


Stories With Happy Endings

by Zetared



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV), Matilda (1996)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Past Rape/Non-con, Willow Hate (Ish!)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2020-05-14 09:26:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19270429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zetared/pseuds/Zetared
Summary: Tara Maclay is no stranger to starting over. Jenny Honey understands that sometimes endings are actually beginnings. Matilda maintains that grown-ups are, as ever, utterly useless without her.





	Stories With Happy Endings

**Author's Note:**

> Almost all the dark elements in this fic are off-screen OR canon-typical for BtVS. I tried to tag as best I can. Please take care of yourselves.
> 
> I feel that the Willow Hate tagged in this fic is totally deserved. Season Six Willow was a mess, and the way this AU branches off, she doesn't get a chance to redeem herself. Sorry, Willow fans. I also love her, and I tried not to be TOO cruel to her characterization in this.

_“But nobody else is gonna to put it right for me. Nobody but me is gonna to change my story.” - Matilda the Musical, “Naughty”_

Tara calls Dawn on a payphone outside of the saddest, loneliest gas station she’s ever seen. She’s halfway to wherever it is she’s going--over fifteen-hundred miles from Sunnydale and counting. It’s wet and cold in a way that California never was. Tara is homesick for the Hellmouth. Or, at least, for a few of the people who live there. 

Dawn is angry, but she answers the phone, this time, which must mean that she’s feeling homesick for Tara, too. 

“Hi, Dawnie,” Tara says, like this isn’t the twelfth time she’s called, like this isn’t the only time so far that she hasn’t been ignored or immediately hung up on. Like her heart isn’t caught in her throat at the sound of the teenager’s voice. 

“I can’t believe you left,” Dawn says in greeting. She pauses. “I mean, I can. What Willow did...I get it, I guess. I just wish you hadn’t. Left, I mean. So, I’m mad at you for leaving. And I’m mad at Willow for making you leave. You should know that.”

Tara smiles through tears and swallows her pain. She doesn’t want Dawn to have to worry more than necessary. “I know. I’m sorry. I miss you.”

Dawn sighs, gustily. “I miss you, too. We all do. Willow especially.”

Tara ignores that last bit. She and Willow already said their goodbyes. It had been a bitter affair, as delicate a process as walking through a minefield. She shivers. It had been so difficult, sharing breathing space with Willow, even just to say goodbye. Thinking about Willow makes her mind itch, even now. Sometimes she finds herself lost in her own head, frantically trying to place an errant thought, unable to determine what the gap in her memory even _was_. She wonders, sometimes, in the dark of night as she falls asleep, how many times she had the same argument, heard the same joke, or ate the same breakfast, over and over again, always reset whenever Willow started to feel the moment wasn’t right. She thinks it might be a lot. Memory spells are not especially difficult, after all, and Willow likes it when things go exactly right. Unbidden, she remembers Glory, the goddess’s hands in her skull, consuming everything that made her _her_. Tara stifles a sound of pain, hardly aware that Dawn is still speaking to her. 

“I’m sorry, Dawn. My bus is leaving, I have to go.”

“Wait! But where are you--?”

Tara hangs up, she thinks. Honestly, she doesn’t quite come back to herself until much later, rousing to reality to find that she’s sitting in her seat on the bus again, staring out the window at the scenery as it whizzes by, a blur of non-color. She unclenches her fists, slowly, and ignores the half-moon marks left behind in her palms. 

The distance between Tara Maclay and Sunnydale, California grows and grows. Tara counts the miles and wonders, achingly, if she’ll ever reach that magic--metaphorically, that is--measurement of space in which she’ll finally, finally, feel far enough away to be okay, again. It had mostly worked the first time, when she packed up everything and ran away from Arkansas all the way to California. This time, she just has to go even farther. She doesn’t know what else to try. 

\--

The east coast isn’t like Arkansas, and it’s _completely_ different than California. The weather alone is strange, often cool and overcast. The air is salty, blowing in from the nearby sea, but the scent is nothing like what she remembers coming in off the Pacific on those warm spring days when she and the other Scoobies had--

Nevermind. She has just enough savings to start her life over again. Her mom left her a tidy inheritance, and she won’t starve. She can even return to college with a sizable loan. Still, not all of her credits from Sunnydale transfer over, and that means an extra year before she graduates at least. With miscellaneous school expenses and the high cost of living, she needs a proper source of consistent income, even part time.

She tries a couple of places, but only gets a call back from the public library. It’s a minimum wage gig, but the training is easy, and the job is fairly lucrative. All the books make her miss the collection at the Magic Shop with a fierceness she had not anticipated. The first few nights, she lies awake, alone and feeling hollow. After a while, she gives in to gnawing temptation and uses some of her hard-earned library money to place an international call. 

“Hello?” 

Tara starts to cry, and she feels ridiculous about it. While they’d always gotten along well enough, she knows that she and Mr. Giles--she’d never managed to drop the “Mr.” to his face without feeling vaguely guilty--aren’t actually very close. Even so, his distinct voice is a balm to her soul, a strong adult presence when her own progression into adulthood is going so poorly. Besides, ever since their magically induced duet, she feels they have a special connection. They are two people who have suffered for the sake of building up someone they love only to be let down in their own respective ways.

“H-hi, Mr. Giles,” she says, sniffling a bit. 

“Tara? Good Lord. Is something the matter? Is Buffy all right?”

Tara shakes her head, unable to speak at first. She swallows, breathing in shakily. “I’m sure she’s okay. I don’t...I don’t actually know.”

“Tara,” Giles says, and he sounds less urgent and much more gentle, now. Tara closes her eyes, wishing suddenly that such gentleness felt more familiar than it did. Wishing her own father’s voice had ever sounded like that, for her. “What’s happening?” 

She explains it all haltingly, how just after Giles had left on the plane to London, she’d taken a bus out of town. How she’d crossed the whole country. How she’s living in a small university town in Maine. How sometimes she can’t remember things like where she’s from or who she is, and it scares her because show knows that long-term exposure to mind-altering spells can cause side effects that never go away. 

Giles listens, quiet on the line except for the odd murmur of support. When she winds down, she’s out of words and out of strength, so tired she can barely keep her eyes open, so she doesn’t bother. The darkness behind her eyelids isn’t as scary as it had seemed in the minutes before. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, out of habit. “I know you’re busy. I shouldn’t have bothered you.”

“It’s never a bother to hear from you,” Giles says. “I am...I am sorry, for what happened to you, Tara. But I am also very proud of you for doing what you felt was in your best interests at this time.”

Tara knows Giles is angry with Willow. She reminds him too much of his own youth, perhaps, with her cavalier, selfish use of the magicks. Considering his anger, he’s being very careful not to mention Willow now. Perhaps it’s for Tara’s benefit. Perhaps it’s for his own. She isn’t sure. She also isn’t sure if she’d care, overly much, if Giles were to speak unfairly of Willow. There are times she wishes she herself were strong enough to really put into words how she feels, even knowing that it would hurt Willow to hear it said. 

“Thank you,” she says, because she is grateful, not just for what Giles has said but because he picked up the phone at all. “I should go. It’s late.”

“Of course. Sleep well. And, Tara...you are free to call me any time. I hope you know that.”

Tara smiles. “I know. Goodbye, Mr. Giles.”

She sleeps better that night than she has in weeks. 

\--

Her life develops a new routine. Sleep, breakfast, bus. Weekdays, she spends all morning in classes and then buses to the public library for work. On Saturdays, she busses directly to the library and works there all day. The library is spacious and beautiful and full to brimming with people, most days. There are storytimes for children, educational workshops for teens, and quiet places for study and research for adults. Tara starts to recognize the regulars and, despite herself, makes connections. 

A blond woman with a perpetual frown brings all five of her sticky, noisy children to the afternoon story-time every day. Tara learns quickly to help the librarians out by seating each of the siblings with at least two other children between them. Almost immediately, storytime becomes a much more manageable event. Thomas and his little sister Maria come to the library directly from school. Thomas smuggles their dinner--cellophane wrapped sandwiches, usually--in inside of his tattered red backpack. Tara knows outside food and drink isn’t allowed, but all she does is steer Thomas toward a hidden corner near the self-help section, where no one ever goes and no one can sneak up on the two children as they cling to each other and devour their meals. Some days, Tara leaves two chocolate chip cookies for them in a Ziploc baggie. When she comes back at closing to check on the space, she never finds so much as a crumb left behind. Jenny Honey brings a small, serious-eyed girl who is probably her daughter to the library every afternoon. Every night, they leave with a red wagon full to brimming with books. They always return at least half of them the next day, and Tara would almost think they weren’t actually reading them if not for the way the girl greets her each time, eager to relate to Tara everything she learned the night before. 

A homeless woman in a red scarf gives Tara a smile and a perfectly folded origami flower on Tara’s first day. Tara learns her name is Anne. Every day that Anne comes into the library, she brings Tara another newspaper flower. Behind the circulation desk, Tara builds a bouquet. Once it starts to crowd her workspace, she gifts the collected bunch of paper art to Sam, the dark, handsome man who used to run the local paper and comes in now to check up on the new writers’ works. He admires the artistry of the newsprint flowers so much that Tara introduces him to Anne the following day.

A week later, Sam and Anne start to come to the library together. Two weeks after that, they arrive hand-in-hand. Anne’s layered sweaters no longer have holes in them. Sam’s eyes lose the sheen of sadness that once left them so hollow and grim. When Tara looks for it, she can see that their auras have mingled together, brilliant green with a winding sparkle of gold. 

Tara isn’t doing magic herself, anymore--it reminds her too much of Willow--but there is no end of natural power in the library. Every patron glows with its light, some brighter than others. The books resonate with power, too, creating a soft, persistent symphony that Tara can only hear if she closes her eyes and tilts her head just so. 

Tara answers directional questions, shelves books, tidies desks, reboots computers, and generally keeps things running smoothly while the librarians--an elderly woman named Mrs. Phelps and a cheerful, balding man named Mr. Dahl--do the rest. It’s simple, cozy work, and she finds herself feeling, if not happy, at least contented in her new life. One day, Jenny Honey’s daughter--Tara can’t remember her name, though she knows it starts with an ‘M’--comes to the library by herself. It’s unprecedented, but it’s also a Saturday, so Tara doesn’t worry that she’s missing school or anything. Technically, she’s not supposed to worry about things like that, period, but she does anyway. Once, she herself had spent a lot of school days hiding in the public library. She’d also worn long-sleeves all year ‘round and jumped at sudden movements, and no one had ever noticed it. So far, she hasn’t seen anything like that among her younger patrons. She watches, though, just in case. 

“Hello. Where’s your wagon?” Tara asks Jenny Honey’s daughter, with real curiosity. The routine of Tara’s life so rarely alters that such a serious deviation is _quite_ interesting. 

Jenny’s daughter--and, gosh, she needs to learn the girl’s name properly--smiles. “I don’t need it.” She picks up a towering stack of books and, with some difficulty, places them on the counter. “All of these, please.”

“How will you get them all home?”

Matilda--for that is the name written in the checkout cards of the books she returns--shrugs. “I’m not going anywhere with them. Mom has teacher inservice all day. I’m going to stay here and read.”

“Oh. You must, uhm. You must miss her.” It’s a dumb thing to say to a stranger, even a child, but Tara can’t help it. She’s never, ever seen Matilda without Jenny and vice versa. Tara’s not seen a closer mother-daughter pair since...well. Since before her own mother died. 

Matilda smiles again. It’s a bright, happy smile, the kind of smile that all children everywhere should have cause to wear. “I do, a little. It’s nice, though, too. Mom says I’m getting bigger, now, and that means I can do more by myself. I used to _have_ to do a lot of things by myself, and I hated it. It’s different, though, when it’s a _choice_.”

Tara isn’t sure what to say to that, so she just nods and carefully hands Matilda her stack of books. “Those are due in two weeks, but I suppose it doesn’t matter to you.”

Matilda laughs, utterly delighted. “No. It doesn’t. I’ll be back in a couple of hours to check out some more.”

\--

True to her word, Matilda comes back around lunchtime to trade her first stack of books for a new one. 

Tara finishes up the transaction and then goes on her lunch break. She sits alone in the small, out-of-the-way break room and works her way through a slightly soggy turkey on rye. She reads a book she’d saved from the discard bin--it hadn’t been checked out in ten years, according to the card--and somehow fails to absorb a single word. 

When she comes back from lunch, Matilda is where she’s been all morning, curled up in a big, poofy armchair, already halfway through one of the new novels she’d checked out. 

Tara passes her by and, with no fanfare whatsoever, drops a Ziploc baggie of cookies into Matilda’s lap. Matilda looks up, baffled. Tara meets her eye and smirks. Matilda’s answering grin is knowing and wide, a co-conspirator against certain rules and restrictions. Tara feels a bit like a child herself, again. She remembers keenly the oppression of grownups and the kind of inexplicable happiness caused by such a simple misdemeanor as eating cookies for lunch. Matilda eats her cookies so stealthily that even Tara--who finds herself compulsively checking up on the girl--never catches her at it, though she does see Matilda throw away the empty bag when her mother comes by and picks her up later in the afternoon. \--

Tara stands in her kitchen one night and wakes up. It’s past one in the morning, and she’s pouring herself a glass of water. The glass is overflowing. Water drips over her fingers, shockingly cold. She doesn’t remember getting up to get it. She doesn’t remember much, actually, past putting her dinner dishes in the sink to soak. She’s wearing pajamas and her alarm clock has been set. The last six hours are a big, gaping void. 

She stares down at the overflowing glass in her hand and for one truly terrifying moment doesn’t recognize her own fingers. 

When she can think and breathe again, she calls Giles.

\--

She forgets her name during a final exam on an early Thursday morning. She stares at the blank line that asks for it, completely at a loss. Finally, the more practical part of her decides that she should press ahead and finish the test. By the time she’s completed the final question to her satisfaction, she remembers her name again. She writes it at the top and turns it in. 

She walks out of the classroom and down the hall to the nearest ladies’ restroom. There, she locks herself in a stall and leans against the cool metal walls, sobbing herself hoarse. If she calls in sick to the library, she’s certain that Mrs. Phelps would be understanding. But there’s an after-school teen program, the daily storytime, and the weekly Algebra tutoring session for the community’s homeschoolers all scheduled that afternoon. If she isn’t there, Mrs. Phelps and Mr. Dahl will be swamped. So, she goes to work. Her head pounds during her bus ride, and her eyes are red-rimmed and puffy in the window against which she rests her aching skull. 

When she steps through the doors of the library, her headache disappears. The terrible, nagging anxiety in her chest releases its stranglehold on her heart. By the time she puts her things away in the breakroom and sits down at the circulation desk, she feels normal enough again to smile at Anne and accept her newest paper flower--a tigerlily in bright orange scrapbooking paper--with good grace.

The library’s magic settles over her skin, a soft blanket of security and something that might well be love. In between patrons, Tara closes her eyes and leans into it, relieved. 

“Hello, Ms. Maclay.”

Tara opens her eyes with a snap. “Hello! Sorry. I was, uhm…”

“Basking?” Jenny Honey offers, brightly. She has a gentleness in her that Tara finds hard to resist, but there’s also something almost wily to her eyes, a kind of coy understanding that frequently makes Tara blush. 

“Yeah, I guess so. Hello, Matilda.”

Matilda looks up. She has a stack of books in her hands, as usual, and is reading from the book perched precariously on the top. Tara knows for a fact that the stack of books in question is not the new batch, but are, instead, the books that the small family took away last night and are returning now. “Didn’t you just read that one?”

Matilda raises her eyebrows. “Yes,” she says, and then leaves it there as if it’s perfectly reasonable that she’s reading the book again not even a full day later. Perhaps it is. “We’d like to return those and check these out, please.” Tara nods and does the checking out, first. She isn’t supposed to linger too much over the process, but she can’t help but make note of the titles as they go by: _Walk Two Moons; Equal Rites_ and _Small Gods; The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring; The Trumpet of the Swan_. Tara reads for entertainment, but most of the books that the Honeys check out are unfamiliar to her. Then, her eyes glance over the cover of a book that is very familiar, indeed.

She pauses perhaps a little too long, as Matilda pipes up with a concerned “Are you ok, Ms. Maclay?”

Tara stares down at the worn cover of _Annie on My Mind_ and just barely resists the urge to hug it close to her chest. When she finally moves to check the book out, she looks up to find Ms. Honey gazing at her with warm, knowing eyes. Tara remembers, in clear detail, running out of her father’s home, the door slamming behind her. She’d ridden her bike all the way to the library in town that day--not for the first time, not for the last. By the time she got there, her legs had ached and she could hardly catch her breath. She’d found solace in the library, as she’d done so many times before. As was her habit, she’d walked in idle circles and picked up a random book from the shelves, not caring what they were so much as what they promised. She had expected a typical day-in-the-life bit of fiction, based on the cover, but _Annie on My Mind_ had given her so, so much more. It was the first time she’d ever heard of women in love--in fiction or otherwise--who didn’t meet a tragic end. She was seventeen. Six months later, just after graduation, she’d packed a bag in the middle of the night and travelled all the way to California entirely on her own. 

“It’s a very good book,” Jenny says, levelly, and Tara feels her heart flutter in a warm, special way she hasn’t felt in months. 

“Yes,” Tara agrees, and smiles at Matilda, who looks from her mother to Tara to the book with some puzzlement. “It really is.”

\-- “It never occurred to me before,” Matilda declares the next afternoon as she pushes a small stack of books onto the counter. She’s alone again, which makes Tara worry, since it is a Friday and not a Saturday like the last time. 

Matilda must see something in the way Tara hesitates, but she shakes her head in a firm, jerky motion. “Mom had to stay late. She’s the principal of my school. She gets busy, sometimes. I don’t mind; I’m very good at taking care of myself. Please stop worrying about me and answer my question.”

Tara blinks. “You didn’t ask me a question.”

Matilda pauses, seemingly running the conversation back in her head. “Oh. Sorry, I didn’t get to it, yet. I meant to ask you: When did you read it, the first time? _Annie on My Mind_ , I mean?”

Tara checks in all of the returned books and uses the motions as an excuse for a long silence. “I’m not sure I can talk right now.” Indeed, there’s a line growing behind Matilda’s small frame. The girl turns her head and glances at all the people behind her. She sighs, clearly upset about being interrupted. Still, she steps aside.

“When it slows down again, may I come back?”

Tara nods. “Of course.”

It’s so busy the rest of the afternoon that Tara doesn’t even have the time to think about the strange, somewhat awkward conversation again. It’s only a half-hour before closing that Tara has a chance to sit down at the desk and breathe. Almost immediately, Matilda appears. She’s got to be eleven or twelve years old, but she’s still so small she can barely see over the counter without standing on her toes. 

“Are you free?”

Tara smiles. Even as worn out as she is--it’s been a very long work day--it warms her heart a bit to feel so wanted. “Not really. I have to close up. But you can help, if you want.” 

Matilda’s expression of delight is so fiercely bright that Tara feels slightly dazzled. She’s reminded fleetingly of Dawn, and it makes her heart ache. Together, Matilda and Tara walk through the closing procedures, which start with making the first “please go home” announcement over the intercom and end with Tara locking all the doors and turning off the lights. 

“It never occurred to me before,” Matilda says, repeating her first pronouncement from hours earlier. It’s so pitch-perfect that Tara suspects she’s rehearsed her side of this conversation in advance. 

“What never occurred to you before?” Tara asks, patiently, because Matilda has left a long pause that seems to beg the question be asked. 

“ _Annie On My Mind_. Most of the books I’ve read before are about, you know. Princesses and princes together and that sort of thing.”

“Oh, I see.” Tara pauses, wondering why Matilda is talking to _her_ about this and not her mother. “So, what do you think about it, now that it’s, uhm, occurred to you?”

Matilda looks thoughtful. “It made some things make more sense.” “Did it?”

“Yes. Have you read _Anne of Green Gables_?”

Tara laughs, seeing where this is going. “Yes. Anne and Diana are very close.”

“Yes. It’s just subtextual, though. Not like _Annie On My Mind_.”

“Oh. Yes, I suppose so.”

Matilda glances at Tara sidelong. “You should know, I’m taking classes from your college. I go to my Mom’s school, too, for socialization. But I’ve been taking college courses since I was eight. I’m going to finish my Bachelors, soon.”

Tara continues to shut off all of the public computers, considering this pronouncement and reeling a little from the mental whiplash. “You must be pretty smart.”

Matilda nods. “Yes, I am. I know a lot of things from books. Once I’ve read something, I can remember all of it. And I can work with big numbers in my head. Sometimes I see pictures of problems in the air, and it helps me see the bigger picture and solve them.” She follows Tara into the stacks, where Tara starts to tidy up. She finds a few empty pop cans in the shelves and sighs, picking them up to recycle later. 

“I can do other things, too,” Matilda says. She sounds strange to Tara’s ears, far more shy and uncertain than the outgoing, almost boisterous girl she usually is. 

Tara looks at her, but Matilda doesn’t seem ready to expound, and Tara knows better than to push. “Is that all you wanted to tell me? About _Annie On My Mind_ , I mean.”

“No. I just got sidetracked, again. It happens to me a lot. Thoughts are very fast; words are very slow.”

“That’s all right. Come with me, we have to start turning off the lights. Is your mother going to come to pick you up soon? I can stay with you, if she’s not, but we usually insist parents be here before closing to pick up their kids.”

“Mom is probably waiting in the parking lot. I told her I needed to talk to you alone.”

Tara turns off the first set of lights. For a moment, they are lost to each other in the darkness. Then, the backup safety lights come on, casting just enough light to help guide them to the lower floors. In the vaguely blue glow, Matilda appears strange. Her solemn, wise eyes and determined, pointy chin give her an aspect that strikes Tara as vaguely fae. Tara’s met real fairies, actually, in her time with the Scoobies. Matilda looks like something altogether different and, remarkably, even more unworldly. 

“I’m happy to talk to you about whatever you need, Matilda.”

“Good. ...I mean, thank you.” Matilda stands near the front entrance of the library, watching as Tara locks up the cash box and all those other small but vital tasks. “My mom is a lesbian. Are you?”

Tara doesn’t feel quite as blown over as perhaps she should--she’s been expecting the question all day, though the pronouncement _before_ it is more of a surprise. She hopes that Jenny knew about her daughter’s plans to out her. At the same time, she hopes not. “Yes, I am.”

Matilda’s serious little face goes very thoughtful indeed. She nods once, the same decisive, jerky motion as before. “Okay. I have to go, now. See you tomorrow.”

Tara watches Matilda as the girl races out the front doors and across the parking lot to her mother’s waiting car. Matilda waves at Tara brightly before disappearing inside. Tara waits until the car has left the lot, and then she locks up and makes her way to her bus stop, mind reeling. \--

Giles calls on Saturday, and Tara dutifully relates to him all of the incidents she’s experienced since his last call. There’s usually at least _something_ once a week. Sometimes it’s a small event, easy to dismiss as the kind of brain hiccup anyone might have, especially late in the day after a night of poor sleep--once, Tara forgot the title of the book she was returning to the shelf, even though it was in her hands and she’d just looked at it. Once, Tara called Mrs. Phelps the wrong name for a whole afternoon. Sometimes, events are bigger, like the glass of water night and the exam day. She recites all of them for Giles, even the inconsequential things, and tries to feel like she’s more than just an interesting experiment to the former Watcher. 

“This is very helpful, Tara, thank you. Keep up with the tonics we’ve discussed, and don’t hesitate to call if anything else occurs.”

Tara agrees, and they say goodbye, and she hangs up the phone feeling vaguely empty and decisively alone. 

\--

It’s always strange to see familiar faces in unfamiliar places. It takes Tara longer than it should to place Jenny and Matilda outside of the usual book-filled spaces of the library, but when recognition finally hits, she smiles on reflex. 

Matilda shouts a greeting from across the park, turning to say something inaudible to Jenny before she detaches from her mother’s side and races toward the bench on which Tara is sitting. Matilda, for all she is small for her age, is also fast and graceful, bounding around other park goers with the ease of a deer.

“Good morning, Tara!”

“G-good morning, Matilda,” Tara offers, blushing a little. She’d made the regrettable decision to wear her sweats and an ancient, ratty t-shirt on her day off. She’s wearing flip-flops, and the neon orange polish on her toenails is weeks old and chipping like crazy. She runs a frantic hand through her windblown hair and tries to make the gesture look casual.

Jenny follows her daughter’s lead, though moving at a much more respectable pace. She looks as put together and cheerful as ever, a vision in a floral-print summer dress and thin-strapped sandals. Her nails aren’t painted at all, but they’re still perfect. Tara blinks and tears her gaze away from Jenny’s feet. She stares down at a crack in the sidewalk, instead, unable to meet the eyes of either of the Honey women. 

“Hello, Ms. Maclay.”

“You can call her Tara. She said it was okay,” Matilda scolds her mother.

“O-oh! Uhm. Either way is fine,” Tara assures the sidewalk.

Matilda makes an incredulous noise. Tara tracks the girl’s movements as she circles around and plops herself down next to Tara on the bench. Matilda is wearing worn sneakers with rubber toes. Her shoelaces are tied with such precision that it makes Tara feel a renewed rush of fondness for her young, brilliant friend. “We were just enjoying a walk before going for lunch,” Jenny says. Tara nods her understanding, unable to find the rights words with which to respond. 

“You should come with us,” Matilda says. She’s too self-possessed to reach out and grab Tara’s hand, but it seems like a near thing. “Please.”

“I wouldn’t want to impose,” Tara says softly, and she closes her eyes in dismay at herself. She’s stammering and whispering, falling back into old, terrible habits as her anxiety overtakes her. When she left Sunnydale, she thought she’d broken free of this old, timid self once and for all. Perhaps, like her memory loss, she’ll never shake it. It’s a part of her. Nervous, forgetful Tara Maclay, former witch.

“Matilda,” Jenny says, careful, a note of uncertainty in her voice. 

“It’s not imposing,” Matilda says, voice very firm for someone so small. “You’re wanted. Tell her she’s wanted, Ms. Honey.”

Tara looks up, startled by Matilda calling her mother by her surname like that. She’s never heard her be so strange and formal with her mom, before. Even more oddly, now that she’s looking at Jenny’s face and not the ground, she can see the effect the title has on her. The woman’s wise, warm eyes go piercing, her jaw tightening with something like determination. Tara thinks she can imagine that expression on the other woman’s face quite often, always directed toward a child in need. 

“You’re wanted, Tara,” Jenny says, just as firmly as Matilda does, like Tara’s worth is an irrefutable fact of existence in their eyes. It fills Tara up with an incomprehensible warmth, and she realizes that the feeling is one of inclusion, an emotion she hasn’t felt since...well. Since Willow. Since Willow and Buffy and the other Scoobs had stood there in the Magic Shop and claimed her as one of their own right in front of her father’s face.

“Oh.” Tara says, because she’s overwhelmed with large and complicated feelings. She swallows. “Well, okay, then. I’d, uhm, love to go to lunch.”

\--

They go to the bistro a block off the park, a place that Tara has never even considered as a viable meal option because it’s so completely outside her college-student budget. She nervously eyes the other patrons as they are led to a cozy table in the outdoor patio, well aware that her sloppy weekend attire is far below even the most casual of dress code standards. 

After they are seated, she stares down at the cheery, laminated menu and does quick math in her head. If she gets the cheapest thing on the menu, she won’t have to re-balance her entire monthly budget. 

Matilda looks at her over the edge of her own menu. Her eyes are so serious, it makes Tara ache. She’s seen Matilda happy and laughing hundreds of times, but every now and again the girl falls still and somber in a way that is too-familiar and too odd. Tara knows, with absolute certainty, that Jenny Honey has never, ever hurt her daughter. But she also knows, with only slightly less certainty, that _someone_ has. 

“You should get what you want,” Matilda says, matter-of-factly. “It’s our treat.”

Tara blushes, glancing apologetically at Jenny, but Jenny just smiles reassuringly, nodding. “Yes. You can consider it a thank you gift for all the many hours you’ve spent keeping an eye on Matilda at the library.”

“Matilda doesn’t need much in the way of looking after,” Tara replies.

Jenny looks over at her daughter with a fond expression. “She does, actually, a bit.”

“Mom says I frequently need ‘reining in.’” Matilda mostly sounds proud of that.

“Oh. Well. I guess I’m happy to help with that.”

“Good. Order what you want,” Matilda repeats. 

So Tara orders a giant cheeseburger and a side of fries and a milkshake. It’s the most self-indulgent food she’s had in weeks, surviving on cheap cans of soup and peanut butter sandwiches. It’s all delicious. 

The conversation is good, too. Matilda--perhaps predictably--has a lot to say about the books she’s been reading. She also has a lot to say about school, both the public school where she goes to “be socialized” and the college where she takes some of the new online courses and a ton of weekend intensive classes, too. 

“I wanted to attend the normal roster. It would be faster, if nothing else. But Mom is worried that the college kids would tease me too much--like I haven’t been teased, before.”

Jenny Honey’s rigid posture seems to indicate that there is more to it than a fear of simple teasing. Tara, slowly, is starting to put some pieces together about Matilda Honey’s past. She doesn’t want to stick her nose into anyone else’s business, but, well….

“College kids can be pretty brutual, sometimes. I’m sure your mom just doesn’t want you to be hurt.” _Hurt anymore, I mean_ , Tara thinks, a sense of fellow feeling aching in her chest. Tara can’t help but wonder who in Matilda’s life had used her so badly as to put _that_ look in Jenny’s eyes. She wonders, too, if strangers ever have the same idle thoughts about her. That stops her curiosity in its tracks. Matilda doesn’t owe her or anyone her story anymore than Tara does. They are all more than their past experiences. And, yet, those moments have shaped them in deep, unchangeable ways--some more obviously than others. Tara rubs at a phantom headache behind her temple at the thought.

Matilda sighs. “I can handle myself,” she says, to Tara and Jenny both. Tara has a feeling that this is not a new argument from her. Jenny just shakes her head and goes back to spearing her salad with a bit more vigor than is necessary.

“What courses do you have left?” Tara asks, before she can think better of it.

Matilda shrugs and takes a loud, noisy slurp of her own milkshake--vanilla to Tara’s strawberry. “Just some general education stuff I left ‘til the last minute. I blew through math and English right away, but I’ve been putting some classes off. Like psychology.” Matilda’s face, a wrinkling of her nose accompanied by exaggerated frowning, makes Tara laugh.

“What do you have against psychology?” 

“As a field of study, it’s fine. Even interesting, sometimes. Still, there’s a lot of it I don’t care for, especially historically. Do you know about the Milgram Experiment? It’s horrible, not to mention sloppy and _wrong_.”

Tara shakes her head. She’s always been more invested in magic than any other subject of study. Her grades are decent enough to graduate, but she’s never felt it necessary to commit much of science or history to memory. Sadly, no one ever asks for her insights into Taglarin mythic rites. Matilda launches into a brief summary of Milgram’s experiment into mob mentality and the inherent evil of man. Tara clenches her fists in her lap, all too aware of how Milgram’s research echoes her own family’s mythology of a demonic essence, hidden away in the souls of all its women, making them intrinsically wicked and bad. 

“It’s bullshit,” Matilda says.

“Matilda!” Jenny groans, putting her hands into her hands.

“Sorry. But it is. If you look at the study, you can see it. Plenty of the subjects in both categories verbally said they wanted the electric shocks to stop. They protested, they fought back. That matters. Milgram’s experiment doesn’t prove we’re all evil deep down, just waiting for orders to let us act on our base desires to cause harm. It proves that resisting toxic, hateful ideals has to be taught like any other human behavior. We can stop tyranny and prejudice by raising children and educating adults in a way that encourages goodness. People can choose and learn to be better, no matter what is happening around them or how long they’ve acted a certain way before.”

“Always ready to teach others hard lessons,” Jenny sighs, her eyes upward, not in exasperation, but as if recalling some distant memory. 

Matilda, oddly, grins. “Yes. But it doesn’t always require newts.”

“Mhm. And sometimes the person in question doesn’t learn anything at all.”

Matilda shakes her head. “You don’t know that. No one knows what happened to her, afterward. Besides, remember the Wormwoods? They gave you to me. They didn’t have to do that. It was kind.”

Jenny presses her lips together. She has something right on the tip of her tongue that she wants to say but will not. Tara recognizes that look well. Willow gets that look when she has something mean-but-true she wants to say to Buffy. Usually, Willow ends up saying it, anyway. But Jenny doesn’t. Instead, she just shrugs. “You have to take psychology for your remaining credit, eventually, or you’ll never graduate.”

“I haven’t taken my psychology requirement, yet, either” Tara offers, slowly. She glances at Matilda sidelong, feeling shy all over again. “Y-you could enroll with me in the face-to-face section.” _I’d protect you_ , she thinks, which feels nice. She hasn’t been in a position to protect anyone in a long time. She thought maybe she’d lost the knack. 

Matilda’s expression is as bright as the sun. “Yes, please,” she says, fiercely. “I’d like that very much.”

\--

After lunch, Jenny gives Tara the number to their home phone. 

“Give me a call,” she says, with a warm smile. “I’d love to do this again, sometime.”

And if Matilda seems a little oddly smug in that moment, Tara doesn’t question it. “You should call me, too,” Tara says, giving Jenny her own number right back.

\--

One quiet evening, almost four months into her new, simple existence, Tara’s apartment phone rings. She answers immediately, thinking it could be the university or work. She assumes that it will, in fact, be Giles making his twice-weekly check in. A tiny part of her thinks, hopes, wonders if it might be Jenny, but she doesn’t dare entertain the thought. They’ve had a few more shared meals since that first one, always with Matilda grinning nearby. The last time Tara saw Jenny at the library, though, the woman had smiled and suggested, in an undertone, that maybe Matilda wouldn’t mind spending the evening with a babysitter sometime soon. Tara blushes, remembering that moment again and again, savoring it. She adores Matilda almost as much as she loves Dawn, but the prospect of time alone with Jenny is...of the good, as the Scoobies would say. She’s ready to put the past behind her.

“Hello?”

“Tara, baby, don’t hang up.”

Tara feels her whole world tip sideways. She closes her eyes and breathes in, a reflex against the weight that has suddenly taken up residence in her chest. “Willow,” she says, and she doesn’t even stammer, which only goes to show, perhaps, how much better things have been, as of late. “How did you get this number?”

“What?” Willow says, and she sounds lost, like a child in the woods after dark. “...Uhm, Giles. He said--.”

Tara feels a flash of anger that surprises her. She doesn’t push it aside. Instead, she basks in the flare of heat, grateful for how it makes the stone in her chest erode away. She breathes more easily. “He shouldn’t have done that. It wasn’t his to give.”

“I-I know, honey, really. I’m sorry. But this is important.”

Suddenly, Tara recognizes the odd, quiet cadence of Willow’s voice. It’s not the contrition she had first read it as. It’s...something worse. They had all sounded that way last year, when Joyce Summers had so suddenly died. Willow speaks with the voice of someone who has recently suffered a loss and, now, isn’t sure what to do. 

“W-what happened?” Tara asks, struggling with the words because she so desperately doesn’t want an answer. The names of everyone she loves cycle through her head, but she knows, in the second before Willow speaks, who is gone. 

“It’s Buffy,” Willow wails, and Tara goes cold all over, like the sunlight has been stolen from the whole world. 

\--

The funeral is a strange affair. Tara is a few minutes late because she couldn’t bring herself to return to Sunnydale--to her old life--until the last minute. If it hadn’t been for Dawn, she probably wouldn’t have made it at all. She loved Buffy deeply, had admired her and empathized with her and respected her. But she knows, deep down, that Buffy would understand if she didn’t attend the funeral. Buffy had understood, in her own way, why someone wouldn’t want to go back to those who had hurt them. 

Speaking of. Tara spots Angel in the treeline, lurking just out of earshot of the quiet, nighttime ceremony. Angel hadn’t attended, last time. Last time, they’d buried Buffy during the day. That had felt wrong in all kinds of ways. This is better. Tara tries to take comfort in that. Not many people get the chance to do-over the rituals of death. 

Tara ignores Angel. She ignores everyone, in fact. She wants to reach out for Dawn, at least, but Dawn is standing on the opposite side of the coffin, gripping Xander’s hand like a vice. It strikes Tara as wrong. Spike should be there, instead, safeguarding Dawn’s heart like he had the first time around. But Spike is nowhere to be seen, and Tara doesn’t know why, because it’s nighttime, this time, which means he should be there. He was there for the first one, the sun be damned. Tara knows because of how he’d looked later when the Scoobies stumbled upon him later during patrol. She’d never seen burns so deep, before, not on a walking, talking being. Spike’s bones had been eerily white in the moon’s glow. He’d burned for Buffy, figuratively and literally. And, yet, this time, at night, he’s not there. 

Tara gives herself a mental shake, forcing herself to be present. Buffy deserves her attention. 

After the burial, the old gang moves en masse toward the Summers’s home. They are a small group of somber souls, a found family without their matriarch to lead them. Tara flutters on the fringes of the others. She has been gone for a relatively short time, but the resulting chasm feels insurmountable. Time isn’t the problem; it’s the difference in experience that has changed her. She’s not the same person she used to be. The others can tell--and, she thinks, rather wildly, they don’t like it.

Willow corners her after a shared, silent family dinner, catching her on her way from the dining table to the waiting sink. Giles stands there, washing dishes in slow, methodical circles, his gaze somewhere a thousand miles away. 

Even in the moment, Tara can’t help but feel like Willow picked the moment on purpose. Tara’s hands are full of fragile china and glass. The other Scoobies are elsewhere in the house, attending to their grief in solitude. Tara has to step back against the wall to get out of Willow’s way. She can’t move, she can’t defend herself. 

“Tara,” Willow says, and her voice is full of such earnestness that Tara feels a flash of nostalgia, remembering the bright-eyed witch who had first reached out to her in their old Wicca group. It feels a lifetime ago. “I’m so glad you’re here. Buffy...I mean, everyone...well, it’s just really good to see you. I’ve missed you so much.”

“W-willow.” Tara curses herself for the stammer and how it lingers. She feels like a child again, eight years old and struggling to speak under the piercing, overbearing gaze of her father. “I, uhm, I need to p-put these dishes away.” Her voice catches, so shaky she can’t imagine anyone being able to parse it out. 

“Oh! Right. I’ll help you.” But Willow doesn’t move to help, at least, not immediately. Instead, she clasps Tara’s wrists in her hands, gazing into her eyes with her own. There’s something in those once-familiar eyes that strike Tara as...bad. She can’t describe it any other way. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she says, again. “I need you to help me.”

Tara blinks slowly, feeling...odd. “What’s--?” But her question is lost, scattered to the wind. Belatedly, she realizes that Willow has something in her palms, pressing it against the pulse points in her wrists. She smells pomegranate and something coppery, something that makes her want to gag. Blood. A spell. Dark magic. Something _died_ for that blood, died at Willow’s hands.

“You’re going to help me, aren’t you?” Willow asks, but for all that it’s a question, Tara can hear the order implied.

She feels hollow, suddenly, like a turned over pitcher of water. Willow’s orders fill her up, giving her something to focus on amongst the formless, shapeless sensation of nothingness ringing in her head. “Of course I’ll help you, Willow,” Tara hears herself say. “What do you need?”

Willow’s smile is bright with joy and, just under the surface, a fierce sense of pride. “I knew I could do it,” she says, just under her breath. She lets Tara’s wrists go. The skin where she’d grasped her is stained with marks like bruises without pain and stained far, far too black. The circles in her skin look like shackles. Tara should be appalled or at least afraid. She’s not. She’s whatever Willow wants her to be, and Willow just wants her to be attentive, right now.

“Come on, baby. I’ve got a lot of magic to learn, and you’re gonna help me do it. You remember, like we used to. I always did my magic best with you.”

“Okay,” Tara agrees, because she can’t do anything but agree. Not anymore.

\--

Tara can only watch as Willow works her magic, gripping Tara’s hand tightly in her own, pulling at Tara’s inner power like a plug in a socket. Tara feels very tired, but she doesn’t protest. She couldn’t, even if she wanted to.

Tara watches a man be skinned alive. It’s strange to her, albeit dimly so, how he’d kept breathing, just for a second, after the fact.

The second boy gets away. Tara tries to help, as she’s told to, but Jonathan is smarter than Willow anticipated, and he knows his demon lore well. The beast he summons is massive and drooling. Tara doesn’t stop attacking the large, hairy demon after it claws her face, leaving a wound that bleeds freely into her eyes. She doesn’t stop attacking the demon after it knocks her prone to the ground. She doesn’t stop attacking the demon even after her magic runs completely dry and she’s left with nothing but her hands in her own self-defense. She only stops when Willow says so, and then she’s ordered to take Willow’s hand and run.

Andrew is easy to kill. He begs for his life the entire time, which normally would upset Tara very much, except Willow told her early on not to worry, so she doesn’t. Instead, she pushes the knife in deeper, to speed things up. Willow--black eyed and grinning with sharp, skeletal glee--is impatient, after all, and Tara doesn’t want to make her wait. 

Willow presses Tara’s hand into the fresh grave dirt. Tara doesn’t have any magic left to give, even though Willow keeps telling her to try again. Resurrection magic is dark. It’s the darkest thing there is. Tara’s never conducted dark magic herself--at least, not before tonight. It hurts more to cast it than she had ever realized, like pulling out pieces of herself from the inside one by one. 

Tara can tell that Willow is angry. Tara wants to do what Willow tells her. But she can’t. Physically, she can’t. So, Willow is going to open the Hellmouth up. If the universe won’t return Buffy to the world one more time, then Willow will make the whole world crumble, and this time the apocalypse will stick.

“The world can’t survive without a Slayer,” Willow says, and she laughs at her own joke. 

Then Xander appears. 

\--

Tara sits on the edge of the bed in Giles’s hotel room. She sits and rubs her fingers against her wrists, first one and then the other. The curse is broken; it left like all of the rest of Willow’s spells when Xander finally broke through. The stains, black impressions of the delicate fingers of a woman who had once loved her, remain. Tara can almost see the whorls of her fingerprints left behind. Giles says they might never go away. Dark magic leaves remnants on everything it touches, a grim reminder of one’s gravest sins. Tara does not need to be told this. She’s seen such aftermath already as a bleakness in Willow’s eyes that started years ago and now will never go away.

Tara’s face aches. There’s a series of four deep cuts through her skin, slashing from her hairline across the bridge of her nose, stopping just short of the socket of her opposite eye. It’s just a flesh wound, but it’s a deep one, and it required many careful, tiny stitches. It will scar. 

“He’s taking her away to some witchy convent or something,” Dawn says. Dawn is angry. She nearly died, in the chaos of Willow’s rage and revenge. Dawn is also heartbroken. She lost one sister and then another, all in the span of a few precious days. “Rehab.” Dawn throws herself down on the bed next to Tara, arms crossed over her chest. That gesture, too, looks like anger, but Tara knows that Dawn is just trying to keep herself from flying apart. Tara knows the feeling intimately. 

Tara says nothing. What is there to say? She picks at the skin of her wrists with blunt, broken nails. There is blood under the nails. She tried for hours, scrubbing with a coarse brush and about a liter of dish soap, but she can still see the flakes of brownish red.

“Hey.” Dawn presses, stubborn as ever. Tara loves her, but she wishes the girl would go away. Go away and never come back. Tara wishes the entire population of Sunnydale would disappear completely. That Sunnydale itself would do the entire cosmos a favor and vanish off the face of the planet, never to hurt her or anyone again. 

“I thought nothing would ever be as bad as Arkansas,” Tara murmurs, not really _to_ Dawn as much as _at_ her. She laughs, hollowly, because if she doesn’t laugh she’ll scream and never, ever stop. “I thought that my family had hurt me more than anyone or anything ever could, and if I could just get away from them, I’d be safe.” 

But then the Gentleman. But then Glory. But then Willow. “This place is Hell.” Tara stands. She has luggage, somewhere, a small duffle bag of clothes and her toothbrush. It doesn’t matter. She has enough cash in her pockets to take the bus. Leaving Sunnydale won’t make her safe any more than leaving home had. But she can’t stay. There are too many bodies in the dirt, here. She’s afraid that they’ll come back to haunt her if she stays too long. Anywhere else, that would be a metaphor. In Sunnydale, it’s not. 

“Tara?” Dawn says, reaching out for her. Tara turns to look at her. Dawn’s blue eyes are wide and wet with unshed tears. She looks more lost than Tara has ever seen before, not even when Joyce died. 

“Xander and Giles will take care of you,” Tara tells her. “Spike, too, when he comes back.”

Dawn’s jaw clenches slightly at Spike’s name. Tara might have wondered at that, before. But, now, it’s just another distraction, reeling her back in. Tara remembers what it was like, back home. She remembers how often she’d nearly left, one foot out the door, only to be pulled back in again by an uncharacteristically kind word, a strangely gentle touch, a plaintive voice in the night, begging for her help and hers alone. Dawn doesn’t mean anything by it. No one--well, almost no one--here _means_ to pull at her so, to manipulate or hurt her more than she’s already been. That just makes it worse, somehow. They have such damn good intentions.

Tara misses Buffy so viciously that, for a moment, it staggers her. But Buffy isn’t here to make the nightmares seem surmountable, anymore. She’s dead. And she’s going to stay that way, this time. 

“Don’t call me for a while,” Tara tells Giles, as she passes him in the hall. She expects him to argue, to chase after her, even, but he just nods. 

“Safe travels,” he says, softly, to her back, and Tara understands, now, that they are truly kindred spirits. She wonders how many more hours he’ll wait before he runs away, too. She hopes he’s happy, once he gets wherever he is going. 

She hopes she’ll be, too. 

\--

The bus arrives at her stop three hours delayed. It’s the middle of the night, and the darkness is so inky and deep that Tara thinks it may swallow her. She’s not scared of the thought. It’s a tender kind of blackness. There’s nothing spooky or monstrous hiding in these shadows. At least, nothing she can’t handle. (Maine doesn’t have any Hellmouths, but she _is_ pretty sure she saw a Thoth demon at the library, once. It was using the reference materials, though, and hardly a threat.) 

Tara walks the short distance home alone in the dark. A group of drunk young men follow her for a while. She casts a tiny hiding spell--simple, white magic, the kind that her mother had taught her in nights much like this one, speaking words of power in a subdued whisper, fearful that her father might hear--and disappears from their perception. Her magic has dwindled to just a tiny ember, but she’s confident it will all return, with time. For the first few, long hours after...well, after...she’d felt nothing in her center but an empty, hollow ache. Somehow, despite everything, that was what had scared her the most. Her magic is all that remains of her mother. Losing that is unthinkable. Losing that would have been the end of her courage. She would have rather died.

As it is, her magic remains, however dwindled. As it is, she survives. Whether or not she can thrive, still, is an open question. When she closes her eyes, she sees Warren’s face, frozen in the moment when he realized that he was doomed and that it was going to hurt. When she lies down on her bed and stares up at the ceiling, waiting for sleep, she hears Andrew’s faint, frantic whimpers for mercy echoing in her ears. She wonders if Jonathan, like Willow, will be tempted by revenge. She wonders if she should set up new wards on her apartment to guard against demonic assassins. 

In the end, she decides it’s not worth the effort. 

She doesn’t sleep. 

\--

Her phone rings, and she doesn’t answer because she can’t quite remember why she should. She sits up in her bed, exhausted and confused, and stares at the loud, irritating machine and just...doesn’t know what to do with it. 

She rolls onto her stomach on the bed and buries her head under a pillow to block out the sound until it stops. 

She must doze off despite herself eventually, because it’s the ringing the second time around that causes her to jolt awake, a cry caught in her throat. This time, her memory works as intended, and she puts the phone to her ear.

“‘Lo?”

“Why aren’t you at the library?” Matilda demands. 

Tara can hear Jenny’s voice in the background. She can’t make out the exact words, but she imagines that the woman is chiding her daughter. Her suspicions prove correct when Matilda breathes out a gusty sigh into the phone, causing a rush of static in Tara’s ear. 

“I’m sorry. I know you...I know you’ve been busy.”

Tara had kept it simple, when telling Matilda and Jenny where she was going and why. ‘A friend of mine was in an accident. I have to go to the funeral. I won’t be away long.’ Strange, how she’d thought it would really be that easy, at the time. She had been away from Sunnydale for too long. She had forgotten how terrible it was there.

Tara feels her throat get tight and her eyes flood with tears. She wants to hang up, but she doesn’t want to hurt Matilda’s feelings. In the end, she clutches the phone in her hand, not quite smothering the sob that escapes to the best of her ability.

Something rustles on the other end of the line. Tara can hear Jenny and Matilda having a conversation, too far from the phone to be audible to her ears. Then, Matilda returns with more rustling. “Are you home? Nevermind, I’m sure you are. Stay there. Don’t worry.”

The dial tone is strange in her ears. She hangs up, her confusion almost strong enough to outpace her sudden overwhelming emotions of sorrow and fear and humiliation. 

She curls up on her bed and lets herself cry. 

\-- 

_“I have found it impossible to talk to anyone about my problems. I couldn't face the embarrassment, and anyway I lack the courage. Any courage I had was knocked out of me when I was young. But now, all of a sudden I have a sort of desperate wish to tell everything to somebody.” - Matilda, Roald Dahl_

Knocking at her door wakes her. She can’t have been asleep too long, but she’d fallen asleep, regardless. Buffy had been in her dream. Tara can’t remember the details, but she remembers that. Buffy had been smiling and happy and had pulled Tara to her and let her rest her head on her knees, just as Tara had once done for her. 

It’s nice, if fleeting. All of Tara’s bad feelings come crashing back down again in the light of day. It’s like just after her mother died. She’d dreamed of her mother then, too, and always woke in the morning a little more aware of how much the waking world hurt. 

The knocking, again. Tara gets up to answer it out of reflex. She stops mid-step as Matilda’s voice, young and strong and brooking no argument, sounds on the other side of the door. “Tara, open the door!”

The knocking stops. “Be patient,” Jenny advises. 

Matilda sighs. “Everything is always so _slow_ ,” Tara hears her say, clearly exasperated. 

Tara stands on the other side of the door and stares at it as if it is an alien creature. “How’d you find my apartment?” she asks the door. She hugs herself tightly. Matilda and Jenny are kind people. She knows that. On the tail of what she has experienced, however, the gesture rubs her all wrong. Her home, shabby though it may be, is her space. They have no right to violate that without permission. 

“I’m sorry, Tara. Matilda was in quite a state. She just kept asking Mrs. Phelps until the poor woman gave in.”

“Mrs. Phelps is worried about you and so am I. Tara, please open the door!”

Tara rests her head against the wood and tugs at the sleeves of her sweater, pulling the fabric reflexively down and over her wrists. “Please go away.” So much for sparing Matilda hurt feelings. She can sense the girl’s wounded expression without seeing it. 

“No. Open the door. Please.” When Matilda speaks, her voice rumbles low with determination, Tara realizes that she’d theorized based on data gleaned from Dawn. Matilda, however, is not the sort to melt into doe-eyed, lip-quivering petulance when something doesn’t go her way. She’ll just keep battering against the wall until it crumbles under the force of her will. 

Tara is not a wall. She opens the door. Matilda has her hands on her hips and a defiant, mulish expression on her pixie face. Jenny stands behind her, arms crossed defensively over her waist and an apologetic smile stretching her features too wide. Jenny looks nervous. Matilda looks determined. Either way, Tara can’t make them go.

Something of her resignation must flicker over her face--or maybe it’s the gruesome scars--because the two other women do not enter when bidden. Instead, Jenny glances from the door to Matilda, and Matilda glances from Tara to the open door and back again. 

“We shouldn’t have done this,” Matilda blurts. Tara can practically see the light-bulb go off over the girl’s head. Matilda goes rigid with realization, a look of horror on her face. When she looks to Tara again, her expression is one of contrition. “I wasn’t thinking. We’re your friends, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to show up unannounced. I shouldn’t have bullied Mrs. Phelps at all, but especially not to get your address. You’ve never mentioned where you lived to us before. You didn’t want us to know, yet. We’ve made you feel unsafe. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. ”

It’s so rare for Matilda to repeat herself, so strange to see her clearly at a loss for words, that Tara reaches out. She lets her fingertips brush gently against Matilda’s aura (an intense violet hue, always, now rippling with shades of dingy brown in her distress). “Thank you for apologizing.” “We’ll go,” Jenny says, and she grips Matilda’s shoulder in a gentle hold, near where Tara had touched the girl’s aura. It’s not a domineering gesture but a steadying one. Matilda leans into it like a cat.

“No. It’s okay.” Tara steps back into her apartment. “Come in.”

The Honeys hesitate a moment, searching for sincerity in Tara’s eyes. They must find it, because they troop in, Matilda leading the charge. 

Tara has little in the way of furniture, but she manages to direct Jenny and Matilda to the crowded loveseat. She herself perches on an old cedar chest, once used for spell components, now used as a dresser for her clothes. Silence falls between the three in a way it never has before. Tara tries to look casual, but she’s sure that only makes it worse.

Matilda looks around. She tries to be subtle. She fails. “You don’t have any pictures.”

There is one picture, actually. It’s out of Matilda’s line of sight, sitting on the rickety secondhand nightstand next to Tara’s bed. Xander had insisted they all take it just after the fall of the Initiative, when Xander and Giles and Willow and Buffy were still riding the high of Willow’s soul-melding spell. All four of them stand together, pressed tight, hip to hip, their eyes shining with triumph. Riley’s holding the camera, and he stands to the side and behind Buffy, his head half out of frame, his own eyes more haunted than his too-broad smile would indicate. Tara stands in front of Willow, pulled awkwardly sideways by the weight of Willow’s arm, locked like a band around her chest in a too-tight hug. Tara smiles, in the photo, and she’d meant it, at the time. Tara had found the photo heartwarming, once. Then, later, a reminder of better days. Now, the mere thought of it, sitting innocently a room away, makes her feel sick. 

She starts to tremble. 

“Matilda,” Jenny says, pulling her purse toward her and producing a few bills. “I think we’d all like some dinner, soon. Do you want to go to the Chinese food place down the block and get some things?”

Matilda frowns a moment. Her eyes flicker to Tara, though, and her face clears. “All right. Can we have egg drop soup?”

Jenny nods, and Matilda is mollified. She plucks the bills lightly from Jenny’s fingers and departs. On her way past, she very briefly reaches out and gives Tara’s fingers a friendly squeeze. “I’ll knock when I come back,” she whispers, conspiratorially. Tara doesn’t think that Jenny intends this to be _that_ kind of private conversation, but she appreciates the support, regardless. As the door shuts behind her daughter, Jenny moves from the loveseat. Slowly, giving Tara plenty of time to protest, she sits next to her on the cedar chest. Jenny folds her hands neatly in her lap. She’s wearing a floor-length skirt in soft, doe colored suede and a button-up blouse in a shade of pastel pink. It’s an usual look for her, but a good one. Tara doesn’t know why she’s so stuck on the details of Jenny’s outfit, but it’s better than looking at the woman’s face. Tara doesn’t want to know what expression Jenny has now as her gentle eyes take stock of her. The fresh cuts in her skin, the anxious fidgeting of her fingers, the slight tremble she can’t seem to stop. The dark bruise-like markings, just hidden under the cuffs of her sweater. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” Jenny asks.

Tara shakes her head, muted by a new knot in her throat and a fresh supply of building tears. She can’t believe she’s not cried herself out, yet. 

“Do they know how to find you?” 

Tara swallows thickly, heart aching. For the first time, she realizes that Matilda isn’t the only one in whom she sees her own abuse reflected. “Maybe. She didn’t, before, but I think someone told her. She’s going away, though. Overseas. For...for help.”

“Mine went away, too,” Jenny says, softly. “She left and never came back, and no one knows what became of her. Matilda and others who know about her, they treat it like that’s the end. That out of sight is out of mind and that makes you safe. But it’s worse, for me. I don’t know where she is. She may indeed be far away. She could be right next door, biding her time. I see her everywhere. She was...a unique woman; there is no mistaking her. But I still see her in so many stranger’s faces, in the way they speak or move. I never really feel safe.”

“I’m sorry,” Tara says, because she doesn’t know what else to say. There are no reassurances she can offer, really. She tries, anyway. “I’ll protect you, if you ask. I can do that.”

Jenny smiles. “Yes. I believe you can. Matilda has her ways, too. And I can hold my own, as well. I’ve learned a lot about standing up for myself in the last few years. Even so, it’s so much easier, isn’t it, to be brave when they’re not here?”

Tara remembers how foolish she’d been, thinking that she could pop back into Sunnydale for just a day, just to lay Buffy to rest and then back home--oh. Home--again with no trouble. Yes. She’d gotten cocky, while away. Then Willow had stepped toward her, had said her name in that old, eager way, and all of Tara’s resolve had disappeared. It hurt to think that maybe Willow wouldn’t have had to put a spell on Tara to get her cooperation, at least not for all of it. It had always been so hard to tell Willow ‘no’. 

_I wouldn’t have killed anyone_ , Tara tells herself, and she’s pretty sure that, at least, is definitive. But she would have, maybe, helped bring Buffy back to life again, even knowing how much it hurt Buffy the first time, how betrayed she’d felt. But would that have been for Willow or for Dawn’s sake? It’s hard to say. And it doesn’t matter. The time for resurrection spells is long past. Buffy has returned to Heaven, where she belongs. Tara hopes she’s at peace, finally. 

“We’ll protect you, too, Tara,” Jenny says. And Tara wishes that were possible, that anyone could ever hope to protect her against the seeping, clinging poison that is Sunnydale and the Hellmouth and the gathering forces of darkness. 

“Thank you.” She leaves it at that.

Jenny sits with Tara in silence for the rest of the time that Matilda is away. Tara appreciates it, as much as she can at the time. When Matilda returns, lugging bags of food in thin paper boxes, she knocks as promised. Jenny opens the door, and--after Tara gives them permission--the two women take over Tara’s tiny kitchen, opening fragrant takeaway boxes and laying out plates. 

Jenny and Matilda chatter easily together while they work. Tara continues to sit on the chest, listening in, losing herself in the easy flow of their conversation. Jenny and Matilda speak in strange, disjointed sentences, sometimes, one picking up the words easily where the other left off, whole sections of conversation happening without words at all. Tara remembers she and her own mother communicating in that easy, familiar way. She misses it, but it also feels good, seeing the pattern repeated in Jenny and Matilda’s love for each other. 

Eventually, Matilda hands Tara a full plate. She then sits beside her, cradling her own bowl of soup and swinging her feet. “There’s a cottage in town. Mom owns it.” She says, out of the blue, though not without purpose, if Tara knows the girl at all.

“Oh?”

“Yes. She used to live there, before she adopted me. And afterward we moved into her old family house because it’s much bigger.”

 _Adopted_ , Tara notices, but she isn’t terribly surprised, now. “That sounds nice.”

“The cottage? It is. You should come with us and look at it. It’s been empty for ages. Mom rents it out to people all the time, but the last one finally got a job in Portland and moved on. That’s how it works, you see. The cottage, I mean. It’s for people who need help.”

“Matilda,” Jenny says from the kitchen. “You’re jumping too many steps ahead.”

Matilda sighs. She closes her eyes for a second and then looks at Tara, as serious as Tara has ever seen her. “This apartment isn’t very nice, and you’re probably paying more than its worth for it, and it’s not even very close to your school or the library. The cottage is free, and it's on our way to Mom’s school, so you could carpool with us.”

Tara’s eyes widen. She looks askance at Jenny, who returns with her own plate. “I don’t know what to say.”

Jenny smiles. “Say yes or no, depending on what makes you happiest. Matilda, don’t push her.”

Matilda rolls her eyes a little, but she does fall silent, turning her attention back to her soup.

“It’s very kind of you--.”

“--Not without an ulterior motive. The cottage has been empty for several months, now. We’re tired of having to stop by and air it out. Houses are happier, you know, when someone lives in them.”

Tara looks around her apartment, frowning. “I wouldn’t want to take advantage.”

“There’s a garden in the back. We ask our guests to tend to it instead of paying rent. Have you worked with a garden before?”

Tara smiles softly, thinking of her mother’s green thumb and the long line of hedge witches before her who had practiced that simple, magicless art alongside their more secret pursuits. “Yes, I have.”

“You can keep whatever produce from the garden you wish. Matilda and I go into the farmer’s market every now and again to sell the rest.”

“What about in the winter?”

Matilda can’t help but chime in. “I like to visit the cottage in the winter when Mom has to stay late at work. She comes and picks me up after dinnertime.”

Jenny smiles at her daughter. “In the winter, the guests often watch Matilda and make sure she gets something to eat,” she agrees. 

Tara looks around the cramped, dingy space. It’s served her well enough these past few months, but it has never felt comfortable, never felt like a true home. She knew before she left for the funeral that she wanted to stay here, with the Honeys, forever. Coming back from Sunnydale, she’s even more decided. She’s safe, here. She’s cared about. She belongs in a way she has missed terribly.

“When can I move in?” she asks, ducking her head in embarrassment as Matilda gives a delighted whoop. 

\-- 

_“You seemed so far away," Miss Honey whispered, awestruck. "Oh, I was. I was flying past the stars on silver wings," Matilda said. "It was wonderful.” - Matilda, Roald Dahl_

Tara brushes her fingers gently over the drooping green beans and murmurs a spell. It’s not much, just a cantrip for health and prosperity. The rest of the garden seems content with potting soil and regular waterings, but the beans are stubborn. She figures a gentle nudge can’t hurt. She’s been thinking along those lines a lot, lately, slowly incorporating old, familiar white magicks into her daily routines. She’s missed it.

The shadows lengthen around her as the sun falls down slowly toward the horizon. The long day is nearly done. Summer will be over soon. Time has lost all sense of meaning. It moves so quickly, and yet each day draws out in all the right places, giving her time to savor the good bits. It’s strange how different the world is when one isn’t running around trying to defeat a new apocalypse every few weeks. She is tempted to call it “peaceful,” in fact. 

Which is why, perhaps, the universe decides to throw her a curveball, utterly disrupting her calm.

There’s someone in her garden, lurking in the darkness under the tall trees that line the other side of the garden across from the rustic picket fence. She would suspect it for a deer--it wouldn’t be the first time she’s spotted one sneaking up on her leafy greens--but the shape is too tightly folded in on itself. And too familiar, besides. She doesn’t quite have Buffy’s knack for “the tinglies,” but there’s something in the air, now, that sets her skin to itching. 

She approaches slowly, not sure what to expect from the frantic creature currently plastering himself tightly against the trunk of the gnarled black oak tree.

“Spike?” she says, keeping her voice soft and low. He looks odd to her eyes, dressed in filthy jeans and a open black button up that’s seen better days. His hair has grown out, a shaggy mess of curls, bleached at the tips and a dark, honey brown--untended--at the roots. He looks at her with wide eyes expressing an emotion that reminds her viscerally of her own sense of loss and confusion whenever she finds herself experiencing a gap in her memory. 

“You’re not the girl,” he breathes, trying to back away with nowhere to go. There’s still too much sunlight cast over the lawn and tree against his back is huge. There are charred marks in his clothing, raised burns peeking out from the holes. He’s cut it close with the sun many times already, it seems. “Not the girl, not the girl. Is she gone? Has she gone? I can’t find her, anymore.”

“Stay here,” Tara orders. She scrambles to her feet and runs back to the cottage, grabbing the afghan off the couch. She returns and throws it over his head. He jerks back at the unexpected attack, but then he goes still and quiet. It reminds her--in a manner that would be very amusing in any other situation--of a parrot whose cage has been covered up for the night. She pulls at him until he stands up, still covered by the blanket. “Follow me.”

She pulls him across the garden, moving quickly and quicker still when the blanket starts to smolder a little. Finally, she pushes him into the cottage and then runs about, closing the door and throwing the curtains down over the windows. “Okay. You can take the blanket off, now.”

He reaches up slowly and pulls the blanket down with a soft slither of sound. It lands in a heap on the floor, but Tara doesn’t mind. She’s too busy staring, awestruck, at Spike’s aura. Vampires don’t have auras. Most demons don’t, either. The aura of a living creature is an expression of that entity’s soul. 

“Oh, Spike.” She says, heart breaking for him as understanding dawns. His aura is a bright, shimmering gold cut through with soft violet, pulsing with a blackness that Tara can only assume is his demon’s essence as it tries to choke the light of his aura back. She wishes, suddenly, that she’d paid more attention to Angel the few times she’d been around him. She would like to know how their auras compare. 

Spike twitches under her scrutiny. He presses a hand awkwardly to his chest--it’s covered in deep scratches, and it’s not hard to guess how they got there--as if to hide his soul from her sight. He turns away from her, making a show of looking around the cottage. “Feels like home is here,” he says, apparently to himself. He treads across the hearth rug--his feet are bare, she notices, and mangled from walking who knows how far--and reaches out to the photo she’s put there. The photo of her and the Scoobies, the one that causes her such pain. She couldn’t bear to get rid of it, even after everything. 

“The girl,” Spike says, reaching up, brushing his fingertips gently over Buffy’s smiling face. “Is she gone?” he asks, voice trembling. “Is she?”

Tara swallows thickly, but she doesn’t back down. She takes a few steps toward him, though she doesn’t dare reach out. She speaks to his back. She’s glad he doesn’t want to see her face anymore than she wants to see his. “She died. She was shot.”

Spike’s shoulders tense. “The shooter?” he asks, and she wishes she could feel more shocked by the viciousness in his voice. She knows better than most that a soul means little in the face of revenge. 

“Dead.” She pauses. “Willow killed him.” 

Spike turns, at that, shock clear on his face. “Red?”

“She let the magic in. T-the dark magic, I mean.”

His head tilts. It’s a familiar gesture. Even the soft look in his eyes is familiar, though also changed. More open, now. More directed toward _her_ , specifically, and not just because she belongs in the proximity of the woman he loves. “And now?”

“Giles arranged to have her taken to a coven in Devon. She’s...I don’t know. Being treated, I guess.”

Spike’s expression goes blank. He’s lost, she realizes. Talking about Buffy’s death shook him out of himself, just for a moment, but he’s gone away again. When he refocuses, there are tears in his eyes. “The girl is gone,” he says, no longer a question. He sinks, suddenly, toward the floor. Tara goes to him, wrapping her arms around him without hesitation, going to her knees with him, holding him close. 

He clings to her so tightly she will undoubtedly bruise, but she doesn’t mind. It’s almost nice, in a way, to have someone there who can truly share her grief. Together they embrace in the middle of her borrowed living room and cry into each other’s shoulders, grieving different women for different reasons but with a pain that is unequivocally the same.

\--

She herds Spike through the process of getting cleaned up. She has no clothes for him to wear, so she puts his dirty, tattered things in the old washing machine and gives him a blanket to wrap up in until they’re done. He’s shy about his nudity in a way that surprises her. It’s odd, the small ways that having a soul affects him. Less odd, perhaps, that it seems to have driven him a little crazy. Tara has heard enough stories about Angel to know that he, too, struggled after being cursed with his soul. She wonders who cursed Spike and why. She doesn’t ask, though. She’ll find out in good time. Until then, she just wants to make sure he’s ok.

Of all the people from her past she had expected to swoop back into her life, Spike had not been one of them. She had anticipated that Dawn might eventually track her down, that Xander might take it upon himself to check in on her, that even Giles himself would stop in for a visit, one day. Spike’s appearance is a complete surprise. But he is, in his own way, a kind of friend. And, as Matilda had said, the cottage is a place for people who need help. There was magic seeped into its walls long before Tara got there; maybe that magic called him, somehow, just a little bit.

Spike needs help from _someone_ , for sure. Even once clean and re-dressed, he’s twitchy and self-conscious, often talking nonsense to people that Tara is certain aren’t there; mostly he apologizes to those phantoms, over and over again. She only recognizes a few of the names. She’s not surprised that one of them is Buffy’s. 

He’s also half-starved, from the looks of him. He’s always been lean, but now he’s outright bony, his high cheeks hollow in a way that makes her own stomach clench in sympathy. She manages to pry out of him that he’s been feeding on animals during his journey and nothing else. She knows she should be guilty for feeling grateful for that that--Spike has more than likely been eating people’s pets--but it’s certainly better than him trying to eat people or starving himself to dust. 

“The butcher is on the other side of town and he closes soon,” Tara tells him, apologetically. “I won’t be able to get any blood tonight.” The thought of buying blood at all makes her feel sick, but she’ll do it for his sake. Even if he didn’t have a soul, she’d do that. She’s tired of losing her friends.

Spike doesn’t hear her. Or he does, but he doesn’t find what she says worth responding to. Instead, he rests his elbows on the kitchen table and puts his head in his hands, fingernails digging into his scalp as he speaks under his breath. She can only catch a few words, but she vaguely recognizes it as a poem that she learned about in her classes years ago. “In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave; thou, over whom thy Immortality broods like the day, a master o'er a slave.”

She is about to ask him who wrote that one--just to engage him directly, if nothing else--when someone knocks at the door. For a moment, she’s thrown by the noise, but then she remembers; she had promised Matilda that the girl could come over and play board games. Jenny’s monthly school board meeting always starts early and runs long. Matilda often visits, those nights. 

“Oh no,” Tara says, chewing worriedly on her lip. “Spike, that’s a friend of mine. I forgot she was coming here tonight.” She thinks about hiding him away, maybe sending him to fret and mumble to himself alone in her bedroom. It feels mean, though. Spike shouldn’t be alone anymore. He’s been alone, just him and his soul, long enough. She thinks that’s part of why he’s so far gone. 

“Tara?” Matilda calls from the other side of the door. “Can you please let me in? My arms are full.” A knock comes again, and Tara recognizes the dull sound now as Matilda’s sneakered foot kicking against the wood. 

Tara stares at Spike, who continues to sit still as a statue, muttering bits of nonsense to himself. 

Then, the doorknob turns and Matilda enters. Her arms are, as stated, full to bursting with a stack of board games, several bags of processed snacks balanced precariously on top. It doesn’t occur to Tara to wonder how the girl managed to open the door. 

Matilda freezes when she sees them. She looks oddly...embarrassed? “Oh! I didn’t--.” She pauses, distracted by the sight of the man at Tara’s kitchen table. Spike’s clothes have been returned to him, but he doesn’t look much better for it, thanks to the charred holes and tears in the fabric. His knobby bones and bloodied toes don’t help. 

“Matilda, I’m so sorry. I should have called you to cancel. I don’t think I can play, tonight.”

Matilda, her eyes still focused on Spike, frowns. “Well, I can’t go back home. It’s too dark out to walk, and Mom already left for the school. Tara, who is he?”

Spike looks up, the first movement he’s made in a long while. He sits up like a dog on the hunt, wild eyes meeting Matilda’s curious stare and latching there, unblinking. Spike licks his dry lips and speaks in a dull whisper, "My face grows sharp with the torment; Look! my arms are skin and bone! Rake open the red coals, goodman, and the witch shall have her own.”

Tara grips his shoulder, squeezing tight, afraid he’ll scare Matilda with his ravings. 

Instead, Matilda’s serious face brightens with a smile. “I know that one. It’s by John Greenleaf Whittier, isn’t it? About a woman who thinks her child is a changeling.” Matilda’s face grows thoughtful, as if casting back in her impressive memory. “‘It's not the milk from my bosom, but my blood, that she sucks in.’” Matilda directs her smile at Tara, appearing rather gleeful as she says, brightly, “It’s pretty gruesome.” 

“Uhm,” Tara replies, unsure what to say. “This is my friend Spike. He’s had a difficult time.”

Matilda nods her understanding. She places the tower of games on the small table and offers Spike her hand to shake. Tara watches, worried. 

Spike stares at Matilda, his glazed eyes going soft. Tara wonders if he sees Dawn in her, as Tara herself had once done before she got to know the girl on her own merit. Slowly, the vampire lifts up his hand and takes her much smaller fingers in his own. “You made it quiet,” he tells her, marveling.

Matilda snorts. “That’d be a first, probably. Hi, Spike. My name is Matilda.”

“Matilda, Gathering Flowers,” Spike says, to Tara’s confusion and Matilda’s delight.

“You know an awful lot of poetry,” Matilda compliments. Well, from Matilda, at least, a direct statement like that is a compliment. Matilda admires anyone who knows things, especially things that she herself has not yet learned.

Slowly, for the first time since his arrival, Spike smiles. “Yeah.” His eyes fall to the board games. “Chutes and Ladders,” he says, reaching out for the box. “S’morality game. Funny, that.” 

“I just grabbed all the games we have. I don’t like that one very much. It’s all luck and no strategy.”

Spike’s eyes take on a particular light that makes Tara immediately relax in the face of something familiar--she knows that calculated expression very well. The vampire looks over at her, eyebrows raised. “You got any cards, Glinda?” he asks, hopefully.

“Tarot cards,” Tara says, uncertain.

Spike waves a hand. “Good enough in a pinch. Bring ‘em over. If the girl likes strategy, she’ll love a good round of poker.”

“Spike,” Tara warns, but Matilda interrupts.

“Oh, yes, please! I’ve been meaning to teach myself how to count cards.”

Tara looks from one delighted face to the other. She sighs, defeated. “Okay. Matilda, sweetie, can you poke around in the ‘fridge and make a few sandwiches while I look for my decks? Spike will want hot peppers on his. They’re in the door in a square-bottomed jar.”

By the time she returns, Matilda and Spike are sitting close together at the table, munching on their sandwiches and chattering back and forth about something called onegin stanzas. Tara feels a strange sense of contentment at the sight, parts of her her past and her present intermingling like old friends. She wishes Jenny were there, too. The unexpected longing makes her blush, and she pushes it aside. 

\--

Spike looks odd in the bright blue top. 

“You’re really sure?” Tara asks him, skeptically. They’ve been in the store for two hours, at least, and she’s ready to be done. The store will close for the night shortly, anyway. Men’s clothing is expensive, and Spike’s taste is...unexpected. She wonders, often, where his duster has gone. He looks naked without it, no matter how many different outfits he wears.

“Dunno. You don’t like it?”

“Uhm, I’m not the best judge,” Tara says, in a manner that she hopes is diplomatic. “It’s not your usual look.”

Spike pulls awkwardly at the neck of the shirt. “Isn’t it?” He sighs. He pulls the shirt off and tosses it into the ‘no’ pile. “It’s all mixed up in my head. I don’t remember. No, I remember. But it’s...everything feels wrong.”

Tara picks up the small bundle of ‘yes’ clothes. A few pairs of jeans (two dark blue denim, one black), several t-shirts (mostly black with a few whites), and a dark gray hoodie. “These look fine. We really just want you to have something to wear, right?”

Spike shrugs. She can practically see him drawing in on himself as the seconds pass.

“Let’s pay and go home,” Tara says, and hopes that he retains his presence of mind long enough to get back to the cottage without a fuss.

When they arrive, Jenny is waiting on the front steps. She looks beautiful, glowing in the soft lamplight. Tara knows the woman has her own key, but she’s not surprised that Jenny wouldn’t let herself in uninvited, now that the cottage is Tara’s to claim.

“Hello,” Jenny says, standing up. She’s wearing a flowing summer dress and a careful smile. She holds her hand out to Spike.

Spike jerks back slightly, giving his head a shake. Tara’s luck has run out, it seems. She watches, helpless, as the vampire sulks off toward the back garden, muttering distantly to himself, his eyes unfocused.

“S-sorry. He, uhm--.”

“Matilda told me,” Jenny says, gently. “It’s all right. He’s more than welcome to stay with you. I just came by to make sure you were doing well and to see if there’s anything Matilda or I can do to help.”

Tara swallows against the sudden lump in her throat. “You’re both so kind.”

Jenny smiles and sways toward Tara. She gently brushes her fingertips against Tara’s own where they hang at her sides, gripping the bags full of Spike’s new clothes. “You know you’re our friend. We love you.”

Tara wants desperately to kiss her. She steps back abruptly, clearing her throat and blushing. She’s too warm, all over. She hasn’t felt that rush of head-to-toe heat in what feels like lifetimes. It feels strange, now, though not entirely unwanted. “I should check on him. He’s...he can be difficult.”

“I’ll leave you be,” Jenny says, peaceably. If she feels snubbed, she doesn’t show it. “But Matilda and I, we’d like to visit you--both of you--sometime soon, all right?” 

Tara nods, unable to respond verbally without stammering over her words. Jenny leaves, and something important and warm and its own kind of magic goes with her. For a moment, Tara stands in the silence in the glow of her patio light and wishes, wishes, wishes--. “--Glinda! The refrain! A repeating, happening again!”

Tara opens her eyes at the shout from the backyard and sighs. She hasn’t a clue what Spike is upset about, but she probably shouldn’t leave him to his own devices, all the same. 

“I’m coming,” she assures him, and makes her way toward the garden gate.

\--

Tara comes home from her shift at the library to find the door unlocked. She swallows hard, pulls the simplest defensive incantation she knows to mind, and steps inside with caution and soft, careful steps. 

Noises, indistinct but unwary, drift from the kitchen. Tara follows them.

The moment she steps into the threshold of the room, she feels herself relax bodily. She loosens her fingers, the magic held there let free to dissipate harmlessly back into the air from which it came. 

Spike looks up from the book in his hand and stares at her. He has flour on his chin and a somewhat guarded expression in his eye. “You’re early,” he accuses. From his elbow, Matilda leans across the counter and glances at the oven clock.

“She isn’t,” Matilda says, matter-of-factly. “We’re just late. I told you not to waste so much time measuring the flour.”

“Gotta measure it carefully,” Spike retorts, his attention fully on the girl next to him, now. “Gotta fluff and level. That’s what the bloke on the telly says.”

Matilda rolls her eyes expansively, “I told you, if you wanted to be that precise, we should have used a kitchen scale. Metric baking is superior to American recipes, if what you’re after is accuracy. As a Brit, you should know that.”

Tara smiles, amused by the exchange. “Are you baking cookies?” she asks, though the evidence is quite clear. There’s an open carton of eggs on the table and a splash of spilled dark-chocolate chunks scattered across the countertop. Someone--Matilda, probably--has been filching pieces of chocolate from the bag.

“Yeah,” Spike says, though he doesn’t sound exactly definitive about it. Spike rarely sounds completely certain about things, these days. “I don’t know about bakin’, much, though. Used to have a cook, when I was...younger.”

Matilda frowns at him, thoughtful, accessing. Too canny for Tara’s comfort, honestly. She wonders, not for the first time, if Matilda has noticed all the blackout curtains drawn tight over the once open, cheery windows. The only light in the kitchen, right now, is what comes from the overhead fixture and the standing lamps Tara splurged on for the sake of her own fragile human eyes.

It’s not the only clue available, Tara knows, but it’s the one that routinely troubles Tara’s conscience the most. Tara misses the sunlight, and Matilda knows Tara and her preferences well enough to spot the discrepancy. Even if Matilda doesn’t suspect that Spike is a vampire, she probably at least suspects him to be a rude houseguest, forcing his shadows in where they don’t belong.

“It doesn’t matter if they don’t turn out right,” Matilda declares, turning her attention back to mixing the dough, “They’re still cookies.”

Spike seems doubtful, but when the girl orders him to make rounded balls with his spoon and plop them a certain number of inches apart on the cookie sheet, he does exactly as ordered. Tara smiles to herself as she wanders back to her room to put her things away. Spike is always ready and willing to meet the demands of imperious women, is seems, even with a soul.

A few hours later, the three of them sit together on Tara’s borrowed couch, watching reruns of old sitcoms and steadily working their way through a plate of cookies and a half gallon of milk. That’s how Jenny finds them, Spike sprawled out and only half present on one side of the sofa with Matilda and Tara snuggled up companionably on the other. 

“Hello,” she says, knocking at the door as she enters.

Jenny hugs Tara when Tara goes to greet her, and the resulting warmth flowing through Tara from head to toe leaves her dizzy and nearly giggling. 

“Oh, uhm,” Tara says, about to offer Jenny a place on the couch and some cookies, too.

Matilda grabs up the plate and beats Tara to it, grinning at her mom with obvious pride. “Spike and I made them.”

Jenny’s eyes flicker over to Spike, who stares blankly at the TV and mutters to himself, though with only minimal agitation--Tara considers his current state pretty promising, all things considered; he hasn’t gone into a screaming match with himself in days. 

“Thank you,” Jenny says, politely, picking up the two remaining cookies and taking a large bit of the largest one. She smiles as she chews. “Very good.”

“I know,” Matilda says, beaming. “I told Spike they’d turn out all right.”

“You should know better than to question her, Spike,” Jenny offers to the man on the couch. She likely isn’t expecting a response, but she speaks to Spike as if he is fully cognizant, regardless. She always does. 

Tara wonders, sometimes, what she and Spike have done--in the grand, cosmic sense--to deserve such kindness. It seems unthinkable, all things considered, but she won’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

“Yeah, yeah, kid’s a genius,” Spike says from his sprawl, presence returning around him like a cloak. He blinks a few turns and turns in his place to look at Jenny over his shoulder. “Hey.”

“Hello,” Jenny repeats, warmly. “How was your day?” 

Spike blinks slowly, clearly working to draw his thoughts into line. “All right. Slept through most of it. Gonna end up properly nocturnal, at this rate.”

Matilda’s shrewd expression goes even sharper and Tara despairs. 

“Spike,” Tara interrupts, before the situation can get any worse, “You reminded me, can you go and take the trash to the curb? They’ll pick up tomorrow really early. I don’t want to forget, again.”

Spike grumbles, but it’s a show of his soul (perhaps) that he promptly slides off the couch and goes to do as bidden. 

Matilda watches him go and turns to Tara the moment he is--presumably, if he were human--out of earshot. “You know I’m going to figure him out sooner or later, don’t you?”

Tara can’t help but give into the rush of fondness the brash, direct question inspires. She leans forward a little and cards her hand through Matilda’s loose brown hair. “Yes, sweetie. Just be gentle, when you do, all right?”

Matilda frowns, perhaps puzzled by the response or maybe offended by it. In the end, she shrugs off whatever emotion she feels and turns to her mother, instead. “Are we going home, now?”

“Yes, we’d better.” Jenny looks to Tara with her usual warm, understanding gaze. “We’re all meeting here for dinner and games tomorrow, though, right?”

Tara nods. She’s been frantically preparing for said dinner in her head for what feels like eons. Spike has promised to help her out, but she still worries. “Of course. We can’t wait.”

Jenny kisses her cheek without warning as she leaves, following on Matilda’s oblivious heels. Tara closes the door behind them with one hand pressed to her warm cheek, her eyes very wide.

Spike learns against the doorway leading from the kitchen to the living area and snorts softly. “Twitterpatted,” he accuses.

Tara sticks out her tongue and throws a pillow from the couch at his head. He doesn’t duck in time--vampire reflexes, ha--and ends up with a faceful of embroidery for his trouble. What follows may or may not be an impromptu game of cat-and-mouse or maybe just a game of tag, Tara isn’t sure. Either way, they end up falling all over each other somewhere between her bedroom and the bathroom in the short hallway, Tara panting and Spike--weirdly--panting, too.

 

“That was so juvenile,” Tara says.

Spike laughs. “Yeah. S’great, huh?”

Tara pokes him in the side. “Go away. It’s time for humans to be asleep. ‘Properly nocturnal’ my butt. Do you want them to know what you are?”

Spike grunts softly as he sits up from the floor. He shrugs. “Dunno. I don’t really care, much. Don’t think the changeling or her lezzy mum are gonna go into slayer mode. Do you?”

Tara makes a face, though she’s not sure if she’s more offended on Jenny’s behalf or Matilda’s. “No. I don’t think they’d do that.”

“So, then? Why shouldn’t they know?”

Tara puzzles over that question long after she shoos Spike off and snuggles down into her bed. Why not, indeed? \-- Everything happens so quickly that Tara decides, later, that there’s really nothing she could have done. 

One minute, everything is normal and peaceful in the cottage. Matilda carries plates of food out into the backyard to set on the patio table. Spike lurks in the kitchen, ostensibly finishing up the last of the dinner prep but actually waiting for the final sliver of sun to slip down under the horizon. Tara and Jenny set the outdoor table, chatting amiably. 

Then Matilda decides--without saying a word--to go out the front door to retrieve something from Jenny’s car. Then she circles around the car into the street to open the door. Then...well, Tara isn’t sure of the specifics of what happens, then.

All she knows is that Spike shouts and there’s the sudden screeching cacophony of tires and a high-pitched child’s scream and--.

By the time Tara and Jenny cut through the house and arrive on the scene, everything is in chaos. The driver of the truck lurches his vehicle into the middle of the road and spins his tires, roaring away from the scene of the near crime. Spike sits, hunched over, on the far side of the road on the sidewalk, Matilda bracketed under the protective arch of his body and limbs. There’s the smell of something burning--not just rubber--and smoke rises from the expanse of Spike’s curved spine. 

“Matilda!” Tara yells, just as Jenny shouts “Spike!” and they rush forward in tandem.

Tara grabs the smoldering vampire and pulls him to the house. He fights her, snarling, baring fangs at her. Tara winces at the sight of his game face but ignores the aggression, tugging at him. “Out of the sun, out of the sun!” she chants, pulling until he relents. 

Jenny tries to take Matilda from his hold, but Spike turns his game face on her, instead, hissing like an angry cat. Jenny doesn’t reel back or even let go of her daughter’s trembling body, but she doesn’t fight Spike for her, either. They make an awkward escape into the cottage, like a six-legged race. Spike stumbles and crumples on the living room rug and Tara beats the small flames bursting over his shoulders into submission. Matilda squeaks as Spike’s arms tighten around her.

“Matilda--” Tara begins, but the girl herself interrupts, her voice muffled though entirely level.

“I’m fine. I didn’t see the car coming, but I guess Spike did. I’m not hurt. Spike? Spike. I’m not hurt. Not even a little. I want you to let me go, now, though, please. Will you, please?”

Her voice wavers, just a tiny bit, on the final plea. Tara assumes that’s what breaks through Spike’s feral confusion. His arms loosen and Matilda stumbles out of his hold, walking right into the waiting arms of Jenny, instead.

“Oh, baby,” Jenny whispers, choking on tears. “Oh, God. Oh, you scared me, oh my God.”

“I know, I’m sorry, I know. Please don’t cry. I’m sorry.”

Tara turns away from their moment, a bit self consciously, and directs her attention to the growling, crispy vamp, instead. “Are you okay?”

Spike’s soft, compulsive growls melt into a string of confused whimpers. “What--?” he manages, weakly, gaze falling on Jenny and Matilda’s frantic embrace. Slowly, his yellow gaze clears and melts into a more familiar blue as his game face melts back under the human glamour. “She all right?”

Tara pulls Spike’s larger hands into her own and gives them a squeeze. “She’s fine. The truck drove off, though.”

Something dark and murderous and very scary flickers over Spike’s face, made all the more terrifying for how it looks in his human guise, untouched by the demon aspect. “I can--.”

“Don’t,” Jenny says, voice waterlogged. She sniffs and digs into the pocket of her dress for a tissue, dabbing delicately at her nose. “Please don’t. It doesn’t matter. I just--Matilda and I both would prefer we finish the evening as planned. Don’t we?”

Matilda stands up from their crumpled embrace on the floor and nods. “Yes, please. I’m starving.”

Spike laughs.

\--

The sun is well and truly set by the time they gather themselves up and troop out on the patio for a lamp-lit dinner. For a while, all four of them eat in relative silence, lost in their own thoughts. Perhaps predictably, it’s Matilda who finally breaks the calm. She looks up from her plate and stares right at Spike with piercing eyes.

“Garlic?” she asks.

“Nah. Tingles, maybe.”

“Sunlight, obviously yes. How long?”

Spike shrugs. “Not sure. Try not to test it too seriously. Longer than five minutes? Less than ten, most like.”

“Wooden stake?”

Spike’s grin is ghoulish. “Right to the heart, yes.”

“Decapitation?”

“Yep.”

Matilda tilts her head slightly. “If I drop a bag of rice, will you be bound to stay put until you’ve counted all the grains?”

Spike snorts. “Thankfully no.”

“Blood?”

Spike looks down at his innocuous plate of totally normal food. “Yeah.”

“From where?”

Spike looks at Tara for support. 

“Spike drinks animal blood, sweetie. I get it for him at the butchers.”

Matilda looks at Spike’s plate and back to his face, again. “Are you hungry, right now?”

Spike shifts uncomfortably in his seat. “Had a nip before you lot got here.”

“That was hours ago,” Matilda dismisses, frowning. “Are you hungry?”

Spike looks at Tara again, clearly at a loss. Tara kicks him gently under the table. “Just say yes, if you are,” she advises.

“Kinda, yeah,” Spike mumbles, ducking his head. There goes that strange, soul-forged modesty, again.

Tara goes and gets him a mug of microwaved blood. By the time she brings it out to the patio, the back-and-forthing Q&A has advanced considerably.

“But how _many_ people?”

“Lots,” Spike says, cringing. 

“Matilda,” Jenny interrupts, taking pity on the vampire. “Let’s cool it with the questions, hm? We’re supposed to be enjoying a nice, family dinner. What have I told you about nice, family dinners?”

Matilda sighs dramatically. “They aren’t platforms for brutal interrogations.” 

Jenny meets Tara’s eye as she places the mug in front of Spike. “I withstood a similar round of twenty questions the night she read _Annie on My Mind_ ,” Jenny explains. Tara blushes.

Spike hesitates but eventually surrenders to his bloodlust and picks up the large ceramic mug, taking a loud gulp and then another before surrendering his hold on it, licking his lips. Tara catches a flash of fang and a glitter of gold in his gaze. She’s pretty sure he’s just showing off for the company, now.

From there, they drop the vampire conversation all together and focus instead on more typical, almost banal topics. Tara and Matilda discuss their college courses. Jenny recounts a funny story of a strange situation she’d recently experienced during a school board meeting. Spike jumps in--to Tara’s shock--to talk about his days as a young man studying linguistics at university. That sparks a new track as Matilda and Spike debate the relative merits of Cambridge and Yale and an assortment of ivy league institutions, all of which Matilda knows would accept her but none of which she herself finds especially worth her talent and time. 

“I’d be happy enough with just my Bachelor’s,” Matilda says, with a sigh, “but the best place to learn _more_ is at a school.”

“You just gonna sit about and learn things your whole life?” Spike questions, and there’s something in the way he says it that makes Tara perk up, shooting the vamp a questioning look. He ignores her, for the moment, attention fully on Matilda.

Matilda’s shoulders draw up defensively toward her ears. “What’s wrong with that?”

Spike hums softly, making note of the girl’s defensive posture, perhaps, or maybe even scenting her sudden fear on the wind. “Nothin’,” he says, purposefully leaning far back and away in his chair. He doesn’t speak again until Matilda’s shoulders have dropped into a mostly-relaxed posture, again. “S’just not quite living, is it, to spend all your time chasing after knowledge?”

Matilda looks at Jenny, clearly at a loss. Jenny clears her throat.

“Matilda is still learning...work/life balance, so to speak. But you don’t need to worry, Spike. Matilda’s done very well since joining the public school. She understands the importance of making connections.”

Spike is silent for a while, clearly thinking before he speaks; this in and of itself is so novel a situation that Tara finds herself sitting up sharply in her seat, leaning forward just a little as if to capture every word. 

“When I was--before I was turned, I mean--I was a bit of a scholar. More than a bit of a nonce, too, but that’s not here or there. The point is, I spent all of my human life with my nose stuck up some book or another. I had a head for learning--I took to languages, especially--but that’s all I was good for, really. The only people I spoke to on the regular were my mother and the servants. I couldn’t make any friends. All my peers thought I was about as interestin’ as a wet napkin, and they were right. I just wouldn’t want you to get caught in that same wheel, Changeling. It’d be a real waste of your too-short life.”

Matilda considers this with a serious face and wide eyes. “I suppose I could take a few years to explore my options after graduation,” she says, slowly. 

“Sure. Travel, a bit. Meet some new folks. Get into a spot of trouble, even. It’ll be good for you.”

Jenny sighs. “Please don’t encourage her to get into trouble. She doesn’t need the support.”

Matilda grins at Spike. “She thinks I’m a ‘chaotic force.’”

Spike grins back. “Good. Ya oughta be, I reckon.”

\--

Later, a long while later, after the dishes are cleared and washed and games have been played and Matilda and Jenny have driven away, Spike stops Tara on her way to her bed.

“You know the kid really isn’t quite human, don’t you?”

Tara blinks at him. “No. I thought you were just being...you. Are you sure?”

Spike shrugs, the way he’s taken to doing when he cares more than he wants to admit but doesn’t want to show it. “Dunno. Pretty sure. She doesn’t smell right.”

Tara frowns at this information, concerned what it might mean. Lots of things might cause a person to smell ‘off’ to Spike’s demon. He can identify strong magic, more often than not. He’d scented Joyce’s tumor, too. 

“Is she okay?”

Spike does not shrug. “Yes,” he assures her, firmly. “She’s healthy as a horse, Glinda. Just...off, somehow. I can’t tell you much more than that. I just thought you oughta know.”

Tara hugs him. He melts into it much more easily, these days. “Thank you.”

“Yeah, all right. Just...go off with you, huh? Vampire can’t get any peace and quiet around here, all you women running about.”

“You love it,” Tara says, breezily. And Spike does not deny it.

\--

Tara nervously picks at the button on the front of her cardigan. It’s a little loose, and she should have taken the time to stitch it on more snugly before leaving the house. Now her button will pop off at the most inconvenient time possible, and her sweater will hang all funky, and she’ll look terrible, and Jenny will hate her.

Across the small booth table, Jenny smiles her usual warm smile and reaches forward, cupping her hands warmly over Tara’s fidgeting fingers and drawing them with ease to rest on the table, instead.

“It’s fine,” Jenny assures her, gently. “Are you fine?”

Tara takes a deep, steading breath. “I’m sorry. I just haven’t been on a date in a long time. Not since--I mean….” she trails off and starts fiddling with the salt shaker on the table, instead.

“We can go, if you need to.”

“No! No. God, you’re so nice all of the time. Don’t you get exhausted?” Tara gasps, putting her hand over her mouth. “Oh, geez, that was so rude, I’m sorry.”

Jenny laughs. “I’m not always _so_ nice,” she says. “Only to people who deserve it. And you do. Don’t you think so?”

Tara considers this. “I-I guess. I don’t...I haven’t thought about it like that. I don’t think people deserve or don’t deserve kindness. We should always try to be kind.”

Jenny nods. “I agree. Think of it this way: You’ve never done or said anything to inspire anything _but_ my kindness. Do you know what I mean?”

Tara blushes. “Yeah. I think I do. And...I’m glad.”

Jenny recaptures her hands and holds them, right in public, for all the world to see. Tara can’t find it in her to be nervous about that. Sure, she’s not in California, anymore, but it doesn’t matter. Jenny and Tara have promised to keep each other safe. 

Tara’s nerves calm progressively over the course of their dinner. By the time they’ve eaten most of their sandwiches and fries, she’s feeling almost as relaxed as if it they aren’t on a date at all. “I kinda miss Matilda,” she admits, with a smirk.

Jenny’s answering smile is broad. “Yes. I do, too. I have to admit, I’m glad Spike talked her down from applying to more colleges. It’s selfish of me, I’m sure, but I would miss her terribly if she were to leave so soon.”

“And she’s so young, too.”

Jenny sighs. “Yes. I’m afraid she’ll always be too far ahead of the curve. I don’t really know what to do. It was my idea in the first place that she skip ahead, academically. But now that I’ve set her on that path, I worry it might stunt her growth in other ways. Spike isn’t wrong; she has a troubling tendency to lose herself in whatever she’s studying to the detriment of everything else.”

“...An old coping mechanism, right?”

Jenny stills, caught out. “I’m not sure if--.”

“--It’s okay. We don’t have to talk about Matilda’s history. I just. I r-recognize the impulse. I used to turn to something, too, to hide. Once I left...that place...and went out on my own, it was hard to be interested in anything or anyone that wasn’t, uhm, wasn’t related to that interest. It’s how I met my last girlfriend, actually. We were in the same student group at my first college.”

Tara has a brief, disorienting moment, wondering what would have happened if she hadn’t immediately thrown herself into the Wicca group in an attempt to retain the comfort of losing herself in the magicks. What if she had, instead, branched out into other interests? What if she’d never met Willow at all? No. It didn’t matter. Tara had more than one story of abuse behind her. And Willow had...it had been...had it been worth it? Perhaps, once. Now, after Buffy’s funeral, Tara isn’t so sure. She can still see the blood on her hands, sometimes.

“Matilda has time. And we have time, too,” Jenny muses. 

Tara smiles at the use of the word ‘we.’ “Yeah,” she agrees, readily. “Spike and I will help make sure she’s okay. I promise.” Later, Jenny walks Tara to her door and kisses her, gentle and slow. Tara isn’t surprised to stumble right into Spike the moment she opens the door. In the dim light, his fangy smile is as wide as the Cheshire Cat’s.

“Grow up,” Tara scolds him, primly, and practically dances right to her bed.

\--

Time passes. 

The season shifts and the academic pressure mounts as the semester comes to a close. Matilda visits the cottage more and more in the evenings. Ostensibly she’s keeping herself busy while Jenny works late, but in reality she takes to tutoring Tara through her more challenging classes, acting as a study partner and teacher in turn. Tara’s grades skyrocket and she breathes a sigh of relief, knowing that the interruption of Buffy’s funeral at the midpoint had nearly put her on academic probation. Tara may yet graduate college, after all.

Spike continues to progress. Tara catches him muttering to his ghosts, from time to time. As he never seems especially agitated, anymore, she leaves him to it. Tara understands more than most that there are days when one simply has to talk to the dead. She still converses with her mother at night, herself, as if in personal prayer.

Jenny and Tara go on a few more dates. It’s schmaltzy, typical stuff. Movies and dinners and long strolls in the moonlight. They linger on park benches and kiss in the darkness and hold hands in the glow of the theater screen and more, but with a precocious child at Jenny’s place and a nosy vampire at Tara’s, not much else happens, physically.

Tara actually doesn't mind that much. Between the four of them, they’ve built an odd sort of family. It’s domestic and intimate in its own way, and something about the sheer wholesomeness of it makes sex seem superfluous.

At least, that’s what Tara tells herself. 

“Can’t you ever pick up after yourself?” Tara snaps at Spike one evening, forcibly pulling the dirty blood mug right out of his hands and marching on heavy feet toward the sink with it.

He blinks at her back and then smirks. The smirk remains even after Tara has rinsed out the mug, dried it within an inch of its life, and turned around to face him again. “ _What_?” she demands. 

“S’the fifth or sixth time you’ve bitten my head off this week, Glinda. If I didn’t know better, I’d almost think you’re possessed.” A wrinkle forms on his brow. “You’re not possessed, are you? Because that’d be a right pain in the ass to deal with.”

Tara resists the urge to growl. It would only prove him right. “I’m on edge. I’m sorry I yelled.”

Spike tilts his head just so, and Tara can see the words churning around in his brain long before they are uttered. She holds up her hands as if preparing to cast defensive magic.

“Do. Not.”

Spike shrugs, relaxing back into a less cocky posture. “M’just saying. Me and the sprout could go out a night or seven, you know. I like the little terror well enough, and you women obviously would benefit from some...alone time.”

The worst part about Spike’s words was that he _doesn’t_ make the phrase ‘alone time’ sound as dirty as she’s expecting. He is actively trying to be helpful. 

Tara turns back to the sink and starts to tackle the rest of their dishes. She hears Spike turn on his heel but speaks up before he has entirely left the room. “Do you think...tomorrow night?”

Spike, to his credit, just says “Sure, fine by me.”

\--

The morning after is hazy with sunny warmth. It feels both right and strange to intercept Jenny in the cottage’s kitchen, to grin at each other’s bedhead, to make breakfast together. Somewhere across town, Spike and Matilda are keeping each other company at Jenny’s place. Spike won’t be back until evening--to better avoid the sun--and that means that they have all day to themselves, as well.

“What do you want to do, today?” Tara asks, handing Jenny a refreshed coffee.

Jenny’s smile is _wicked_. Tara loves it.

\--

Tara’s hair is still wet when Spike and Matilda arrive, bearing dinner in big bags full of Chinese takeout. Spike’s eyebrows go up knowingly at the sight of her--shower-damp, red-cheeked and bright-eyed. Tara resists the urge, barely, to stick out her tongue at him. Instead, she waves at Matilda.

Matilda staggers into the kitchen and off loads her assorted takeout boxes onto the table. “Where’s Mom?”

Tara clears her throat but is saved the embarrassment of having to answer.

Jenny appears--also shower-damp, with a towel wrapped around her head--and greets her daughter with a warm hug. “Hi, there. How was your day?”

“Good,” Matilda says, eyeing them both. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, at the moment. “Spike cheats at every game ever invented.”

“And that’s a good thing?” Jenny asks, turning slightly to look at the vampire appraisingly.

Spike leans in the doorframe, unperturbed. “Makes winnin’ pretty easy,” he replies.

Matilda shrugs. She’s already busily dumping fried rice onto her plate. “I don’t mind losing. And, besides, he’s not actually very _skilled_ at cheating. I learned a lot about how to do it better, watching him.”

Spike makes a sharp, offended noise. Matilda grins at him.

They make quick work of setting up the rest of dinner. Their time is spent in amiable conversation, Spike and Matilda bantering about Spike’s immoral tendencies regarding board games, Jenny and Tara musing to each other about which of the two--child or vampire--is the bad influence on the other. 

They’re just finishing up--scraping plates and putting the leftovers up--when someone knocks on the cottage door.

All four look at each other, shocked. Anyone who would ever visit the place is already here.

“Tara?” a familiar voice calls out, muffled by the door. “Tara, are you there? Let me in!”

\--

_“There is little point in teaching anything backwards. The whole object of life, Headmistress, is to go forwards.” -- Matilda, the book_

To Tara’s eyes, Dawn Summers is all grown up. Not just tall, now, but properly aged. Her eyes are wide and hopeful. She has two big, heavy-looking suitcases in her hands. 

“‘Lo, Bit,” Spike mutters as he nudges Tara aside and snatches said heavy bags out of Dawn’s hands. Dawn squeaks in surprise to see him, and then her face goes stony and strange.

“Dawn,” Tara says. She isn’t sure what else to say. 

“Hello,” Jenny greats from the living room, hovering uncertainly. “Would you like to come in?”

Tara smacks her own forehead. “I’m sorry. Manners.” She moves out of the way and lets Dawn step in properly, shutting the door behind her. 

Spike sets Dawn’s bags by the couch and then looks over at Matilda, who lingers in the space between the kitchen and living room as if she’s not sure she belongs in either place, right now. Spike moves behind the girl and nudges her forward near her mom.

“This is Dawn,” he introduces to the room at large. “She’s a friend of Tara’s.” He does not say _and mine_ , which Tara finds confusing but Dawn seems to consider justified, as the lack causes her high shoulders to relax noticeably. 

“Dawn,” Tara says, regaining her composure, “This is Jenny and Matilda.” Jenny looks over at her, and the two share a smile.

Dawn makes a soft, wounded noise. 

“Maybe we should go,” Matilda suggests. Jenny, to Tara’s worry, readily agrees.

“We’ll come back by tomorrow and say hello properly,” Jenny promises, kissing Tara’s cheek as she buzzes by.

Spike mutters something under his breath and he, too, disappears from sight.

Dawn and Tara stare at each other in silence for a long, aching beat.

“You look...happy,” Dawn manages, every word like pulling teeth.

Tara bites her bottom lip, not entirely sure how to respond to the obvious accusation, like Tara is doing something wrong by not being miserable all the time. “I am.”

“Oh,” Dawn says, voice cracking on the simple syllable. Her face is red, tears in her eyes. “I’m not.”

Tara has only to barely step forward before Dawn throws herself bodily into Tara’s arms, clinging to her for dear life, sobbing breathlessly into her shoulder, leaving Tara’s shirt damp.

“It’s okay,” Tara soothes. “It’s going to be okay, Dawnie. I promise. You’re okay.”

\--

Spike wanders in hours later, yawning and rubbing his hair into a terrible mess. He blinks at the sight of Dawn stretched out along the length of the couch. He nabs an afghan off the back of a chair and tosses it over the girl with an expert ease. 

Tara watches him from her place at the kitchen table, steadily drinking her fifth or so cup of tea.

Spike sits down across from her. “All right?”

Tara shrugs. “I don’t know. Not now. Maybe later?” Tara frowns at her emptying mug. “I hate Sunnydale.”

Spike makes a noise of agreement. “She’s mad at me,” he says. His gaze flickers to Tara and away and back and away again. He’s nervous. He’s ashamed.

Tara waits him out, patient, steeling herself for something bad to come lumbering up from the grave of their pasts and haunt them.

“‘Fore I got the soul--I wasn’t ever thinking to do that. Didn’t figure I needed one. Didn’t think it mattered. I loved Buffy, either way. But I didn’t think about what souls are good for. Like a leash, innit, on the demon. Makes a man stop and think before he does something stupid and selfish and _cruel_ and--.”

Tara puts her hands over his. “It’s okay.”

Spike shakes his head vigorously, some of his more recently typical anxiety bleeding through. She half-expects him to bolt away any moment, to lose himself in talking to his ghosts, again, in strange lines of poetry. “No. No, s’not.” He swallows heavily, fists clenching and unclenching under Tara’s fingers. “I tried to rape her.”

Tara flinches bodily at the damning word. She fights every single, tender impulse she has not to draw her hands away from his. “Oh.”

Spike starts to pull away on his own. Her hands tighten on his.

“You went and got a soul because of that?” she asks, just to make sure she understands.

“I hurt her,” Spike says, barely above a whisper. “I hurt her and scared her and I--I couldn’t do that, anymore. Couldn’t do the truly good thing--couldn’t just leave her alone, never see her again--but I thought--I thought if I just...had my conscience back. It was stupid. Worthless, anyway. She’s dead. She doesn’t care about me or my damn soul.”

“I’m sorry,” Tara says. She’s not sure what she’s apologizing for. But it seems like some apology is due.

Spike heaves a shaky breath in and out. His head drops down, forehead resting on top of Tara’s hands on top of his. He looks like a wrecked man, a sinner postulate at the feet of a deity, begging for absolution. Tara lets him cry there. She’s not sure there’s anything else to do but that.

Dawn rises from her place on the couch where she’s been pretending sleep for the last several minutes. She pads up to Spike on soft socked feet and lays her hand on his shoulder. He flinches in shock at the touch and looks up, eyes wide.

“It doesn’t matter, anymore,” Dawn declares. Her words are stilted, her expression blank. “You did something unforgivable. So I don’t forgive you. But it also just...doesn’t matter, anymore. I need friends, now, Spike. Are you going to be my friend?”

Spike pulls away from Tara and Tara lets him, now. He tentatively pulls Dawn into an embrace. Dawn allows it, though she doesn’t go so far as to hug him back. “Always got a friend in me, Nibblet. Never let anything bad happen to you, I swear.”

Dawn hums, disagreeing. Tara knows what she means. Bad things--the _worst_ thing--has already happened to Dawn. But the girl seems to appreciate the sentiment all the same.

“I’m starving,” Dawn announces, tugging herself out of Spike’s arms. “Can we eat something?”

\--

They pass the day feeling each other out, finding a way to fit their jagged, shattered edges together into a more complete and pleasing puzzle.

Buffy is a gap that sits between all of them, impossible to fill. Tara supposes that’s all right, in the grander scheme of things. Buffy deserves space reserved just for her.

In the evening, after school hours, Matilda and Jenny return to the cottage bearing a warm dish of casserole and a loaf of bread from Jenny’s favorite bakery. Matilda holds up an additional bag and announces, brightly, that there’s a chocolate cake in it.

Dawn and Matilda set the table while the adults sort out the rest.

Tara smiles slightly, listening to Matilda grill Dawn mercilessly about Spike and vampirism as a whole. Dawn is taking it well, considering. She’s explaining about Sunnydale, about slayers, about Buffy. 

Jenny meets Tara’s eyes, her brows rising in question. Tara shrugs. There’s time to really explain herself thoroughly later. For now, there’s no harm in Dawn and Matilda swapping stories.

Which is why Tara is so decidedly unprepared when, somewhere in the course of dinner, Matilda decides she wants the butter dish and--rather than asking for it--seems to charm the thing to fly across the table right into her hand.

“The fuck,” Spike says, gracelessly.

“Whoa,” Dawn says at the same time.

Tara just stares. She hasn’t felt the presence of any magic cast. She blinks, looking from Jenny to Matilda and back again. “Uh, what was that?”

Matilda grins, completely unrepentant. “Oh, you know,” she says, airily, buttering her bread. “Telekinesis.”

And Tara discovers that Jenny and Matilda have a story of their own to tell.

Dinner gets progressively more interesting, after that. Jenny and Matilda explain--delicately, obviously glossing over a good dea--about Matilda’s difficult upbringing. How the girl had turned to books for help and love. How she’d found power in them, instead. How she’d used that power to overthrow a villain just as bad or worse than any found over a hellmouth. 

Tara swallows thickly and wonders what it must have been like, breaking away from one’s tormentors as such an early age. 

Dawn, not to be outdone, decides to give for all she’s got, offering an abridged overview of life in Sunnydale, California with Tara and Spike throwing in the odd piece of illuminating commentary as needed. Slayers, werewolves, zombies, oh my.

“My sister died,” Dawn says, matter-of-factly. She pokes at her piece of chocolate cake with no real interest. “But that was just a bullet that did that. The second time, anyway.”

Tara takes the girl’s hand and gives it a warm squeeze. “It was hard,” Tara tells Jenny and Matilda. “It was...always really hard, living there. Fighting that fight. It’s over, now, for us.” Tara looks at Dawn, then. “It’s better, here.” She promises.

Dawn offers her a watery smile. 

Spike clears his throat, pulling everyone’s attention on him. “Sun’s gone down. Anybody wanna finish up dessert outside?”

And they do.

\--

It never goes back to what it used to be, whatever “used to be” might mean. Tara’s memory still suffers in fits and starts. Her magic still feels odd and uncomfortable in her hands, enough that she practices only the most minor of spells, and only then to keep the garden growing and the cocoa tasting right.

Spike’s ghosts disappear gradually. Even on his worst days, he only shuts himself away somewhere in the cottage to sulk. He doesn’t rave, he doesn’t scream at the invisible dead. He just goes away and returns a while later, unusually quiet but as present as any of the rest of them.

Dawn surfs their couch for a few days and then a week and then a month and the three of them start to seriously discuss a change in living arrangements.

“Our house is big,” Matilda says. 

Jenny makes a small noise. “Big enough for three,” she amends, casting an apologetic look at Dawn and Spike.

Tara blushes. “The garden,” she starts to argue.

“Please. I can totally make stuff grow,” Dawn interjects. “Don’t worry about it. Spike can help. Right?”

Spike blinks at her. “You...want me to stay?”

Dawn kicks him under the table. “Duh.”

Spike’s smile is wide, blessed. “Yeah, ‘Bit. I can help, no problem.”

“There’s lots of books about gardening at the library,” Matilda assures them both. “I’ll make you a list.”

Tara takes Jenny’s hand. “You’re really sure? I don’t want to be a bother.”

Jenny kisses her temple. “Family is never a bother, dearheart.”

Tara remembers that. Remembers that feeling of being folded in, accepted, recognized. “Yeah,” she agrees, faintly, watching Dawn and Spike bicker about renovations they intend to make to the cottage as soon as Tara moves out. “I guess that’s true.”

\--

“My favorites all have happy endings,” Matilda confesses. She looks beautiful in the dark green velvet dress with the white floral accents embroidered on the hem. It’s the nicest bridesmaid’s dress Tara’s ever seen, if she does say so herself.

“Hm?” Tara frowns, looking around the small dressing room. She can’t find her left shoe.

“Stories with happy endings,” Matilda presses. “They’re the best ones.”

Tara makes a small “ah-ha” sound and wiggles the abandoned shoe onto her foot.

“Weddings are a common one.”

“A common what?” Tara asks. She can’t stop peeking at the full-length mirror. Does she look all right? The dress, is it too tight? She’s never been good at dressing for her body type, her father always said so and--.

Matilda steps between Tara and the mirror. “It’s a happy ending,” the girl says, severely. She’s grown tons in the past few years. She’ll never be especially tall, but she’s undoubtedly all grown. “Stop freaking out about it.”

Tara snorts a laugh. It’s only a little bit hysterical.

Matilda hugs her, careful not to disrupt the line of her gown or the soft, floaty material of her veil. “I’m happy for you.”

Tara breathes out a soft, contented sigh. She hugs the girl back. “Me, too.” And she really means it, which is marvelous.

“I think I picked the wrong dress, though.”

Matilda groans dramatically, throwing up her hands. “It looks fine! Stop worrying!”

\--

Everything goes so fast. 

Jenny looks beautiful in her simple white dress. It looks like any one of her summer dresses but so clean, so shining. Her hair is done up in an elegant twist. Her eyes are luminous. Tara loves her, loves her, loves her.

There are people in the small church, people Tara knows at the least and adores at the best. Tara hardly notices any of them, her eyes fixated on Jenny.

Giles walks her down the aisle. He only trips on his feet once, so that’s good.

Matilda stands on her mother’s side. Dawn stands on Tara’s. There’s nobody else, but there doesn’t need to be. 

Spike fidgets nervously at his place over by the organ. They’ve asked him to do the bits of readings and things, and Tara half expects he’ll spontaneously combust with the stress of it, despite the fact that the sun’s been down for hours and he’s therefore entirely safe from lighting up, otherwise.

Jenny grins at her. Tara grins back.

It’s a happy ending, at last.


End file.
